Peristiwa hari itu tidak menyalakan kepiting yang retak. Namun justru kepiting fiktif itulah yang membuat saya melihat sore hari lagi, film rumahan terlalu sering, sang ayah membawa hadiah, anak itu menangis, latihan dalam cinta dan rasa bersalah keluarga. Atau itulah yang bagi saya. Demikian pula, mungkin tidak pernah ada salju pada Agustus di Vermont; Mungkin tidak pernah ada kesibukan di angin malam, dan mungkin tidak ada orang lain yang merasakan pengerasan tanah dan musim panas yang sudah mati bahkan ketika kami berpura -pura berjemur di dalamnya, tapi itulah rasanya bagi saya, dan mungkin juga turun salju, bisa turun salju, melakukan salju.

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(The day's events did not turn on cracked crab. And yet it is precisely that fictitious crab that makes me see the afternoon all over again, a home movie run all too often, the father bearing gifts, the child weeping, an exercise in family love and guilt. Or that is what it was to me. Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.)