Without incident, Tina the elderly Subaru made her doughty way across rivers and mountains into the Champlain Valley and spent a comfortable overnight parked on a hillock of grass in the cold rain.

Now at very first light, the Greens are a rumple of dark blue through the kitchen window and the Adirondacks are a rumple of dark blue through the living room window, and the cat of the house sourly waits for me to notice that it's breakfast time.

I have been rereading Dickens's Little Dorrit and have reached the part of the book when the Dorrit family has magically transformed from impoverished debtors in the Marshalsea Prison into a rich and haughty entourage crossing the Alps on their way to a Venetian palazzo. Little Dorrit, the shy, hardworking backbone of the poor family, has suddenly become useless in the rich family. Now she has no one to take care of. All she can do is stare out the window in wonder and imagine what is happening among the people of the prison, now that she can no longer see them, or even admit their existence.

In many ways Little Dorrit is an irritating character--the epitome of Dickens's obstinate pipe dreams about sweet, self-effacing child-women. But she is curious. She imagines. And these characteristics, in her new life as the daughter of a rich man, become liabilities. They reveal too much. She is constantly being told to show less wonder.

I have been thinking this morning about that sad fate. To never show surprise. To never be surprised.

The daylight is strengthening. I can glimpse the shapes of cows in the field beyond the house, thick black and white torsos, heads hidden among the dry stems.