Just before we leave for the evening, the girls run out and cut some lilacs branches. On our kitchen table, forsythia sticks from a friend soak up water in a jar, their yellow blossoms half-open.

Since my girls were little, our house’s doors were a porous membrane between wild Vermont around us and our domestic space: moss, pebbles, fungus, bark…., tempered off in the snowy winters.

In Vermont, April, not March, is the season of in like a lion, out like a lamb. All night long, wind rushed around our house, the official month of opening the windows.

… truth, which I believe to be both unchanging and at the core of all art. I think the essential thing about truth is that it must be experienced, and in order to be experienced, I think it has to appear nakedly, not woven into inherited notions.

—Karl Ove Knausgaard, So Much Longing In So Little Space: the Art of Edvard Munch