I would keep it forever astonishing to me, forever the miracle it was, and in keeping it so I have found that ordinary days become almost unbearably rich, that a boy and a bounding dog and a stretch of ordinary grass can fill a person to the very brim if only she remembers, each time, how nearly it was all lost.

The house had a peace in it that the great mansion never had.

There were no reporters at any gate, no children circling the halls dividing up a living man, no voices behind half-closed doors.

There was a boy, and a dog, and an old man on the porch, and me, and the sound of the sea, and it was, though I would not have believed such a word could apply to my life, a home.

I had never really had one, I realized, that word in its full weight.