THE WEATHER IN THE STREETS.

For a time I lived in Hull, on Nantasket Beach, on Massachusetts' south shore, where the winter storms sent the ocean booming up the streets and threw its lobsters onto the driveways and into the hedges; where the storms would melt your leather shoes and get you icy sopping wet and so cold that you wouldn't turn your frozen face to speak to someone, and so cold that it didn't matter anyway--you couldn't hear.

My younger daughter, Rachel, was there as well. She was different from me, and looked at things differently. She had friends in every corner of that peninsula, and she liked the storm atmosphere and always knew whom to call--who had wood, whose truck might still start. And then her friends and their parents would appear, whole Irish families in hip boots, carrying clam rakes and gargantuan buckets of clams they had dug from the sand. These were permanent residents, and they knew how to behave in a weather emergency; they possessed batteries, candles, whiskey, tobacco and cigarette papers, cocoa, and coffee.

We were living on a beach street, in a three-story house, with Rachel on the second floor, alone, with her sheepdog, Lucky Boy, always walking right behind her, zigzagging, and refusing to stay out of her space, his nails clacking on the hardwood floors, seemingly intoxicated with devotion. I'd catch him checking on her when she was asleep, and catch her talking to him even when he wasn't there. Me, I kept to the downstairs and, usually, to the same ready-to-bolt position in my chair. Way upstairs, or in and out, or mostly gone, was my some husband or other. I worked in Cambridge; commuted and worked and did what I could do. My neighbors asked for no apologies. They wandered onto their porches in pajamas and robes, or into their yards with boots pulled on and a coat thrown over. Their old, infuriating second cars were left parked beside our road, and never mind the cracked tail-light or the lack of a muffler.

Hull had once been, quite a while ago, one of the brighter spots, a resort place with splendid hotels, a bandstand, an amusement park with a famous roller coaster and a hand-carved carrousel under a ...