"I will not go back there. I will not sit on the back step and see the sky take on its color, or walk over the hill for the first glimpse of gray-blue water, or watch from my desk the locust leaves turn over in the wind. My time in the house was a gift, a gift that wasn't meant to last. I should never have called it mine. But the house, in its embrace of me, seduced me. Like many an overeager lover, I misheard its whispers. I got the breathy 'I am yours . . . ,' but missed the final syllables, provisional and hesitating: '. . . only for a while.' "