"Black Lick, Pennsylvania," I say, and it still feels like it belongs to someone else or to some other life. I haven't lived that life in a long, long time now. It's distant like an old fairy tale, the kind mothers tell their children to make sure they behave. "Hardly anything around for miles there either. There was a little town a few miles over, but not a hell of a lot else. Mostly mining country, some forest."

I don't miss much about those days, but I do like it up here, in the quiet of the woods.