“But there is one photograph that has a person in it, and the person is Naya herself. It is winter and there has been a thaw. Wet snow clings to the bare branches of the trees, and the air is full of mist. Naya is standing on the front terrace in profile. She is looking pensively out toward the lawn. She is wearing a short fur jacket and a fur hat with her hands in the jacket pockets. She has on galoshes, or arctics, as they were called in those days. The terrace is covered with snow except in the foreground where it has melted away in patches, and you can see her reflection in the wet brick.”
“When I look at that photograph I can almost literally feel the chill air of Pittsburgh on that winter day in 1934 or whatever it was and smell wet fur and wet wool mittens and hear the chink of arctics as you walk in them without doing the metal fasteners all the way up. I can almost literally feel in my stomach my eight-year-old excitement at having the ground deep in snow and at being in that marvelous house and at Naya’s being there. If it’s true that you can’t go home again, it is especially true when the home in question has long since gone and been replaced by another and when virtually all the people who used to live there have long since gone too are are totally beyond replacing. But sometimes I can almost believe that if I only knew the trick of it, I could actually go back anyway, that just some one small further movement of memory or will would be enough to transport me to that snowy terrace again where Naya would turn to me in her fur jacket and would open the front door with her gloved hand and we would enter the cinnamon, lamp-lit dusk of the house together. But it is a trick that I have never quite mastered, and for that reason I have to accept my homesickness as chronic and incurable.”