Amber’s father was a mechanic, but not in the way that other people’s fathers were lawyers or bankers. The other fathers were what they were only at work, in offices in the city, and while visible in our town they were just fathers. Her father was a mechanic even at home, with his tools and his overalls.

My parents didn’t belong in Waitsfield, but they moved there anyway. My mother answered the first knock at the door of the new house, expecting a casserole. We’d painted the house Evening Fog, she told me, but the woman from across the street wanted to know why we’d painted it purple like Italians. Some people wore their difference honestly, but my

Snowfalls have unique bouquets. Snow isn’t just frozen water; it carries a remnant of the sky. A blue hailstone tastes different from a white one because they’ve taken on air at different altitudes.

Once, at home, I ran around the backyard while my mother sprayed me with the garden hose. I laughed so hard I thought I might burst. Many times after that I asked my mother to spray me with the hose again, but she always said no. She didn’t say it angrily or impatiently; she said it dreamily, as if she were under a spell that prevented her from

My father was an accountant, and he used his boss’s old computer to type up reports for work. He couldn’t figure out how to use the tab key, so he typed spaces between the characters and hoped they’d print as they appeared on the monitor, but they never did. Over and over, inserting and deleting individual spaces. The reports were a mess. I tried

My father wore a fake Rolex that ran about four hours before it stopped. Get yourself a better watch! my mother railed at him, and he said, with perfect hatred pinching at his eyes, Better than a Rolex?

I recognized the difference between the houses that were the oldest and those that were merely the most expensive. I liked the old houses, and I swooned over the girls and boys at school with names like Verity and Cornelius. I knew that I could never build the kind of relationship with money that the people in those stately, drafty, oldest houses

My mother hung antique prints of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln on the walls as if we lived inside a schoolgirl’s report on the United States of America. The fact that some of them were ugly or damaged was beside the point. My parents weren’t after shiny things or even beautiful things; they simply liked getting the things that stupid people

One day my mother emptied my jacket pockets and found two half-used matchbooks and screamed at me. I could have started a fire. But I wouldn’t have wasted a match to start a mere fire. I’d found what someone else had thought was trash, so I took it.