No need to say why we have not been there since December. It is only a house in the woods; it and its surroundings are varying degrees of non- and less sentient. What have they been doing?

With the omnipresence of insects, the winter flock has dispersed; we were not there to feed them anyway. When the leaves flesh out, we will only hear them, or spot goldfinches by their rocking flight. Crows are smart enough to have noted an absence, and irked enough to regret the empty compost bins. Owls are almost never seen; in 25 years one showed itself once, circling the lawn at dusk. They call and cackle in the dark to each other. The migrants, bathing in pools of melted snow or pulling up grubs from the lawn, have come, broken their flights, and moved on.

Storms laid trees on the deer fence. Did any venture in? The poor dog of the couple up the hill had to be put down. Their neighbor owns chickens. Have coyotes paid visits? Foxes? Fishers?

Mice must be having a field day, only not in the field but in the house. We store dry edibles in tins and ziplock bags, but they are tireless (what else do they have to do?). They like best digging out the rodent poison stored in the mudroom; however many layers we wrap around it, the drawer it rests in gathers their leavings. I only hope the owls do not eat mice that have eaten their last meal. Unlikely — we find them, drowned or doubled up, in the toilet or the bathtub, closer to home.

The Christmas tree is still standing in the living room. Thank God we had not yet decorated it — half the ornaments would have slid off drooping branches. There will be a lot of needles to sweep; they last longer than New Year’s resolutions.

We pay a man to mind the pool. It is short enough to be indoors; a current makes it an aquatic treadmill. It was the great indulgence, a birthday present to the swimmer. On cue, every night the motor turns out, churning and heating it.

The tasks that were undone remain so — the door pulls, rocks glued to metal posts, striking aesthetically, unwise structurally, whose rocks have fallen off, and which my wife has asked me, oh, a hundred times, to fix. The problems that were brilliantly solved — the corner cabinet with triangular drawers (if you think a moment, you will understand how tricky it was to arrange that) — vainly await their share of ongoing admiration. Little heaps of equipment — the washing machine, the dishwasher — will their circuits still connect? Have their wires been unchewed? Whenever I see a spider I slap an old yogurt container over it, slide a piece of paper under it, and remove it to the great outdoors. I must have read — I could not have heard it, my family was not superstitious — that killing them is bad luck. Will I have the bad luck to find some larger and deadlier-than-normal specimen nestled into the sofa? The bedding?

I missed planting peas, sticking a forefinger into the dirt, dribbling in seeds. The gardener who has done it for us reported that mint is overrunning the herb garden. Its runners are like Gramscians taking over the culture, tunneling everywhere. If there is any hope of holding them back it is now, while the ground is still rained on, before the sun bakes it. Ant gardeners have transplanted bloodroots hither and yon from the first clump that we planted. Their petals, the whitest things in nature, will have fallen by now.

Orion has left the night room. Are new young people serving coffees in the hip store in what we think of as downtown? Has a second hip store opened? As of our last visit, hip store no. 1’s neighbors were a tattoo parlor, a storefront church, and vacancy.

Even in a country in which white men arrived as recently as in this one, there are leavings and abandonments — bereaved cemeteries, dams without mills, empty railroad right-of-ways. We imagine that places in which we invest emotion, invest it somehow in us in return. Do they?