Certainly, by middle age one knows that ours is a paradoxical paradise, that all times, all lands, all selves are an alloy of scar and grace, that blight may turn to beauty and beauty to blight, like mischievous changelings teasing the stolid… Still, this particular news — a whole gorgeous swamp gone missing — hit me hard… Perhaps I brooded over the great lost swamp because I had attained an age when sympathy for vanished things comes easily, when we are aware of mortality as real and not some absurd concept that has, in any event, nothing to do with ourselves, our only parents, our irreplaceable friend. Certainly, I was beginning to like the past more as people, places, and ambitions receded into it and became its populace. And perhaps that is why I began to go on long walks around the former contours of the swamp, seeking its traces and remnants.

Angela the Upside-down Girl and Other Domestic Travels (1998), p. 135