Finding a true home is a central metaphor in nature writing. It goes a little like this: find a cabin in the woods, move there, declare it the center of your world and the fount of your words. Then choose one of two options: a) move away, because you have other lives to lead, and write about your sojourn in nature, or b) stay in that place and root down until they bury you in the ground. The resulting domestic chronicles have produced some of the best, and in recent years certainly some of the most, writing about the natural world. These books and essays tend to shine with homeowners’ pride, describing not just the outdoors but the doors themselves, and the shingles and crossbeams and other elements of construction. Even when they are written with humility, and with a sense that the writers don’t own the land so much as the land owns them—as in Wendell Berry’s words about Lane’s Landing or John Hay’s about Dry Hill—there is a sense of certainty and permanence uncommon in most contemporary writing, a sense that this is where the authors have planted their flags and this is where they will stay.

But this is just one relationship with home, just one relationship with one’s environment. There are those who have less permanent, but equally intense, relationships with their places. This morning I found myself thinking about a house on Cape Cod, not a cabin in the woods exactly, but an old house in the town of Dennis that dates from the early eighteenth century. It wasn’t town history but personal history that got me thinking about the house: it was in that house that our friend Elena died. Elena lived in the house for little more than four months and did so the whole time knowing that, barring a miracle cure, her time was running out. She was only thirty-eight when she was diagnosed with follicular dendritic sarcoma, just the sixty-first person on record to have that form of cancer. She learned about the disease’s invasion of her body when she went to the doctor because she was having trouble conceiving. About the same time she learned of the diagnosis another friend of ours found out she was pregnant. Elena responded with characteristic bluntness.

“Great,” she said. “She gets to have a baby. And I get to die.”

It was during the fourth fall after my wife and I moved back to Cape Cod that Elena and her husband Paul bought the old house on Main Street in Dennis. Elena was a beautiful woman whom I had gotten to know during summers on Cape Cod as a child, and though I hadn’t known her that well, by moving back she became a member of our close circle of friends. We were the same age; her fortieth birthday would be in January, mine in March. She had returned to Cape Cod in part to be near the Dana Farber Institute in Boston, where she would undergo experimental treatments, but also to return to the landscape she had loved since she was a child. This seemed to me a strong and healthy impulse, to come back home and root down into a beloved place in the face of death.

Elena had lost her long, brown hair from chemo. That fall it was growing back short and spiky, and she had dyed it blonde. One day in September we all went to the beach. She looked so pretty, strong, and healthy throughout an afternoon of drinking beer and diving in the cool fall-ish water that it was hard to believe anything troubling was going on inside her.

Later that week we threw a dinner party for Elena and Paul. Elena looked good, but the news was not. There was no standard way of treating her since only sixty other people had had the same type of cancer. She endured a series of treatments, increasingly experimental, with various doctors and hospitals in New York and Boston. As of her last visit they were out of options and she had been “dismissed,” as she put it, by the formerly enthusiastic doctors. It was now just a matter of waiting.

She faced this news with remarkable strength and composure. Even when, during the second week of September, her own tragedy was subsumed and intensified by a greater unsettling.

“We got out of New York just in time,” Elena said, staring at a replay of the smoldering buildings on TV.

And they had. Until August, Paul had worked in the Mariott hotel located right between the two Trade Centers. By moving back to Cape Cod they had missed the tragedy of September 11 by less than a month.

I remember fall being particularly beautiful that year. My wife and I were renting a small house on the water, and we had fantasies of buying it and staying “forever.” Throughout the previous spring I had taken my coffee down to the beach and studied the bank swallows that nested in the clay bank below the house. Their white, shining, sky-skimming bellies shone as they darted every which way, mimicking the bugs they tailed, zigging through the air. The birds darted, cut, and chased in symphonic flashes of blue and white, as if they were not concerned with saving energy, only expending it. They flew crazy eights and then crazy nines, finally boomeranging back to their holes, their muscular superhero bodies standing guard on twigs outside the dark feather-lined caverns.

The last of the bank swallows had abandoned their cave homes and flown south soon after the terrorist attack, but the rest of the natural world proceeded with its ceremony, heedless of the buildings falling in New York. The cranberry bog reddened before harvest, the eel grass turned its red-gold, the seals returned, and the ocean took on its more impressive winter colors. It was incongruous really: nature striding along on its usual procession toward winter, while for us, despite all the politicians crying for “normalcy,” nothing felt normal. At the time I was writing a book about my visits to the great Cape Cod nature writer, John Hay, who was nearing ninety, but if I’d hoped he might lend some stability then I was mistaken. Fifty years before he had bought ten acres of land in the town of Brewster, paying twenty-five dollars an acre, and since then he had lived atop that hill, a living symbol of human rootedness. But he was as frazzled and uprooted as everyone else, and the terrorist attacks seemed to confirm something in him about where the world was heading. He believed that we were in the midst of a massive epidemic of homelessness and exile.

“People are on the run everywhere these days,” he said. “As if they don’t know where they live. Everyone seems intent on dispossessing themselves.”

I knew that John had first visited Cape Cod because Conrad Aiken, the Pulitzer prize-winning poet, lived there. During our disorienting fall, I often dipped into Aiken’s Collected Letters. I learned that Aiken and his wife, Mary, moved to Brewster in 1940, six years before the Hays. On May 21, 1940, the day the Aikens bought their house in Brewster, Conrad wrote to Malcolm Lowry:

Ourselves, we pick off the woodticks, and pour another gin and french, and count out the last dollars as they pass, but are as determined as ever to shape things well while we can, and with love. Nevertheless, I still believe, axe in hand, I still believe. And we will build our house foursquare.

The rest of the letters from Brewster are the sort of combination of pastoral and grumble common to those tackling renovating an old house in the country. Conrad spent his time “weeding the vegetable garden, mowing lawns, cutting down trees, shooting at woodchucks and squirrels, attacking poison ivy with a squirt gun,” as well as “scything the tall grass,” and, as usual, drinking copious amounts of alcohol. The poet, then fifty-one, had a good deal of pride in what he and Mary were accomplishing—”We both thrive on hard physical work, and feel extremely well”—and exalted in his new surroundings, surroundings that would soon work their way into his best poetry. In his novel Ushant, Aiken complained about “uprootedness.” In Brewster, just like John Hay would after him, he began to root.

“To shape things well while we can.” That line from Aiken’s letter seems to me as good a credo as any.

What animal doesn’t take pleasure in hollowing out, building, re-furnishing, or otherwise improving its home? No doubt the swallows experience some deep encoded pleasure as they tunnel their way into the clay banks. The bluff was such perfect bank swallow habitat that it was a safe guess they had been nesting there for hundreds of generations, in all likelihood beginning not long after the last great ice wall receded. The previous spring, before the birds returned, I had gone out to examine the shadowed tunnels that dotted the undercrust of the bluff. The tunnels retreated at least a foot into the dirt, the birds having lined them during previous seasons with straw and grass, and I sometimes found small feathers, too, left over from the year before. I knew that after the birds arrived, and took a very short rest, the first task they faced would be a kind of massive spring cleaning, or re-excavation, digging out their old homes.

During the fall in her Main Street house, Elena grew sicker and sicker, but in her free moments, between visits to the hospital, she was preoccupied with moving into and decorating her new home. Despite the short timetable, she and Paul approached these tasks the way any young couple might in the early stages of nesting.

“I could stay here for years and years and years,” she said.

I thought of something that the Cape writer Bob Finch had said to me about the first year that John Hay and his wife spent on Cape Cod: “That first flush of rootedness is unrepeatable.”

But Elena did not have the Hays’ leisurely timetable. Her rootedness was, of necessity, more high-speed and desperate. Watching her that fall confirmed my belief in life’s uncertainty, something perhaps at odds with John Hay's ideas about the possibility of settling. I’d gone over to Elena’s house occasionally to help move mirrors, paintings, and beds, and there was something regal about the way Elena pointed to where things should go, sure of their places.

Regal was a word that fit Elena. As well as being beautiful, she was smart and opinionated, combining a real kindness with an acerbic wit, softness alongside a fine sharpness. Elena seemed to take her death sentence calmly, but one could only wonder what it was like for her late at night. For his part, Paul had been just short of saintly, and we saw them frequently enough to know it wasn’t just a surface act. Fate, in a sadistic twist, had dealt him a similar blow less than three years earlier, when he had been the single caretaker to his brother dying from cancer.

Before they moved up from New York City, Elena and Paul had worried about spending winter on Cape Cod. What would it be like after the leaves fell and the people left? Would it be lonely and empty compared to New York? As it turned out, they loved the fall, and their sense of finding a home acted as a minor anchor amidst the wild uncertainty of the rest of their lives. In the face of both September 11 and their own devastating personal news, they fought to build both lives and a place. To shape things well while they could. But as winter came on it got harder for Elena to maintain the illusion of housemaking. With the colder weather came a deeper apprehension.

When John Hay first came to Cape Cod he had a dream that his newly built house was floating out on Cape Cod Bay, bobbing along, washed this way and that.

One day that winter, John and I took a drive up to Coast Guard Beach in the town of Eastham. This was the beach where the famous nature writer Henry Beston had built a small cabin in 1926 and had spent a year in the tiny, window-filled house that perched on the edge of a dune less than a stone’s throw from the Atlantic. The result of that year was his classic book The Outermost House.

When we reached the beach parking lot, John pointed down to where Beston’s cabin had stood.

“I came out here after the February storm of ‘78,” he said. “The sea broke right through to the marsh and took the last of the cottages with it. I watched the houses bobbing in the marsh. They gradually sunk but for a while they bobbed along like small ships. Their windows looked like eyes.”

By late November of that final fall, Elena had taken a dramatic turn for the worse. My wife and I flew south for Thanksgiving and when we returned we went over to see her and were amazed at the transformation. Her face was suddenly skeletal and her upper body emaciated; her eyes drifted from the pain medication. The first night back, smiles—followed by looks of concern—froze on our faces. What we really wanted to do was cry and run away. Instead we stayed for almost five hours, drinking, talking, eating Chinese dumplings, and watching Shrek on DVD.

“I don’t know what to do now,” she admitted. “There’s nothing left to do.”

When someone instinctively said something about it being okay, she disagreed.

“It won’t be okay until it’s another life or I get well.”

I asked her if she would like me to write anything down about what had happened to her.

“If I were going to write something down it would be about the medical experience,” Elena said. "How it’s bullshit. How they desert you after they’re done with their chemo experiments. Not a call, not a card.”

She thought for a minute.

“And I’d write about my hair. What it meant to lose my hair. It’s strange but in the midst of everything, that seems very important. How do you feel like a human being without any hair?”

Despite all the swirling of uncertainty, it was odd how welcoming and homey Elena’s living room felt as December wore on and Christmas approached. Scented candles burned and gifts from friends and decorations were everywhere. We found ourselves constantly drawn to their house for glasses of wine and beer. Elena lay covered in a blanket on her couch, now unable to get up by herself, but still clearly the hostess despite the fog of medication and increasing pain. She would insist that the hospice nurse sit down and socialize with everyone else. Her sister Anne had moved into the house and her poor heartbroken parents hovered around her, doing errands and buying gifts. Elena’s wit would sometimes stab through the haze. One time while Nina and I were sitting in the living room, her mother brought in a tiny glitzy Christmas tree that someone had suggested Elena might like. She didn’t, and soon set to mocking the tree.

Her mother, trying to find a place for the tree, was standing off to the side of the living room when she asked, “Where do you think it should go?” To us Elena mouthed the word “back.” Out of the corner of her eye, her mother caught sight of this and joined us in laughter.

I can understand the tradition of seeing saintliness in the sick. In Elena’s case, it was partly brought on by the drugs of course, but it was much more than that. I’d seen it in my father, too. Elena would stare you right in the eyes and speak directly: that is, bluntly, as well as directly at you. One afternoon Paul called me to ask if I would be a witness at the signing of her will. I stood by her hospital bed while the lawyer read the will out loud and reviewed it line by line with us. I tightened at the phrase “when you die,” words that are usually abstract but were now imminent. Elena, sensing my discomfort, smiled and reached over to touch my arm.

Elena kept getting worse.

On Christmas night Paul called to ask us to visit, but, bloated from a holiday of food and drink, we begged off. Tired, we didn’t detect the urgency in his voice. “She’s not doing well,” he said when we asked. He also said that the family had tried to make a show of opening the presents on her bed, but Elena had barely been able to keep awake.

We agreed to come by the next morning. That night it snowed and was still coming down when we woke. Early that morning my wife and I took a walk on the marsh, tramping through the snow and scaring off a pair of red-tailed hawks, and a great blue heron that flew away like a gray-blue shadow along the tidal inlet. When we got home we called Paul to tell him we had bagels and lox to bring over for breakfast.

But Elena had died earlier that morning. Before she drifted off Paul told her about the snow, but she didn’t have a chance to see it. At six, after he gave her her medicine, her breathing changed, and by mid-morning she was gone. It was December 26, less than a month shy of her fortieth birthday.

We drove over in the early afternoon to find Paul sitting with her body, the cat curled close to her cold side. Elena’s sister Anne was keening in the other room. We offered to help and were soon put to work writing the first draft of the obituary. We left and came back later to drink wine and eat dinner with Anne, Paul, and the gathered family. “I can’t believe it,” Paul kept repeating. Anne wept in powerful bursting sobs. We took our turn sitting with Elena and saying goodbye. Throughout the day family members drifted in and out of the bedroom, sitting and conversing with Elena, until the hospital workers came to take her away.

The funeral was in the Dennis Union Church three days later. Though it did little to alleviate the agony of Elena’s family, it served its community purpose. Elena's childhood friend Kate read poems about romping around Cape Cod with Elena when the two were children; another friend Sam Howe read a touching memorial; and Anne gave a talk that moved us all to tears. Words and stories made Elena’s death more real to me than seeing her body. There was a great communal outpouring of grief. At the reception I drank a beer with Sam Howe. “I’m glad Elena came back here to live,” he said. “Look at all of you. This place has its claws in you. You all end up coming back here.”

Elena was the first to leave, but we all followed her soon after.

John Hay grew sick and moved to Maine, where he had better health care and was closer to his children. He had spent his whole adult life living and writing about Cape Cod, but he didn’t intend to die there. He was, he said, “tired of the cooped-up-ness of Cape Cod. The way that everyone who lives there comes from someplace else.”

As for me, I would land here in North Carolina, after I was offered a job at a university. That spring the house we’d been staying in was sold and torn down for a new, bigger house. We knew both the old owners and the people who had bought it, and they generously offered to let us keep the house if we could find some land to put it on. The image of towing the house to a new location was appealing, maybe even floating it across the Bay, but the fact was that we couldn’t afford to buy land and by then we already knew we were leaving.

As it happened I was back visiting on Cape Cod the day they tore down the house we had rented. I thought seeing the house go would be the worst moment, but it wasn’t. The worst moment came the next morning when I was walking down the beach and noticed that the bank below the house, the one that had been home to the bank swallows, had been torn up by bulldozers. Rocks were being hauled in to build a seawall where the bank had been. In May the swallows would return to look for their homes as they had for hundreds of generations. I imagined them finding their homes not just torn up but covered in stone.

Paul stayed in the house on Main Street for a couple of years but finally moved out and sold it to Kate, the woman who had read her poems at Elena’s funeral. Then Kate turned around and rented it to us during the summer months when we migrated back from North Carolina. It was a strange turn of events. The situation didn’t have any real permanence to it, but the deal was irresistible to us nonetheless. In no way could we call that house home, and the summer went by so quickly there that a month felt like a week. Of course the house had a history of letting time slip away, but it also had a history of rooting, however briefly. And it was something just to be back there again, squatting near the land that we once thought would be forever. It wasn’t perfect but it offered us something. It was a place of layered memory, a place with history. And it was there that we annually practiced the only art I now find worth practicing: the art of living in between.