Harder to Pretend

On a late afternoon walk against the wind, I see the forested section of Folkstone with bleak clarity: the trees beside the houses, the tall trunks, the unrelenting verticality of the winter woods.

In the summer you can lose yourself in green; in winter the gray limbs do not hide the split-levels and center-hall colonials. You are in a neighborhood, all right. You are not in a forested idyll. The trees are a slim buffer, a thin no-man’s land between property lines. In the winter it is harder to pretend.