The day after my husband brought our first batch of piglets home to our farm, they escaped. The forty little black creatures that had seemed so content gamboling in our barnyard throughout the morning had, by noon, slipped out of their fencing and assembled under the ornamental crab apple tree on the lawn.

Because I spent too long in Boston with its long and twisted streets, bikers and Priuses negotiating for space, college students converging at the end of summer, forming clusters along the Charles River, Birkenstocks in spring and Blundstones in winter. Because I was tired of texts from my mother asking if I wanted to pop out for a jog.