Lynne Hugo writes in black Wal-Mart Capri sweatpants. They don't start out as Capris, but she routinely shrinks them in the drier by accident. And she always buys black because it doesn't show where she's wiped the chocolate off her hands. Now that her son and daughter are grown, her previous high grade of below average in domestic achievement has dropped somewhat. Rather, less guilty about it now, she loses herself in crafting language, by a window with birdfeeders hanging in the branches of a Chinese elm towering over the house. When she comes up for air, she hikes by the ponds and along the river in a nearby forest with her beloved chocolate Labrador retriever, Hannah. Her husband -- with whom she planted that elm as a bare root sapling -- joins them when he can.