Searching for Silence in the Midwest

The southern Minnesota farmhouse, my childhood home, hides inelegantly behind a spotty row of evergreens. The trees stand bravely in the wind, the house’s only defense from winter’s bitter gusts. Outside the house’s curtilage lies a frozen expanse that, in warmer months, reveals fertile soil, a place where soybeans and corn flourish. But in November, at Thanksgiving, a bitter frost suffocates the earth.

It was in the farmhouse that I sat at midnight, alone, at the kitchen table, with a cup of tea and one of my favorite childhood books, Louis …