Home again, in a dark kitchen, drinking strong coffee while the kindling in the woodstove snaps in the flame. I'm noticing that, since I've been gone, the dog has managed to nose-smear all the windows. Now she's outside, erupting into sudden unexplainable barks, no doubt at harmless nuthatches. Meanwhile, the rooster, still locked up with the hens in the chicken house, belts out a muffled crow. I should go outside and feed them all. But I am drinking strong coffee in a dark kitchen and thinking, again, about Dickens; thinking, again, about almost nothing; listening to the dog rush through the door and scrabble in her dish; glancing up at the vague snow that has begun to drift down from the flat sky. Moments like this one, I begin to wonder how I ever learned to be a writer even as I realize that these layered comprehensions, these quick, plain intakes of attention, are the root of my work--making the question shift from "how did I ever learn?" to "how did I manage to turn a glance into a sentence?"