I grew up in beautiful country: steep and green, fringed everywhere with trees. My neighborhood was on the edge of farmland, family farms passed down from generation to generation for more than two centuries. Outside my bedroom window, dairy cows lowed on the hills, and corn marched up the slopes in neat rows toward the west, gathering shadows against the brilliant colors of late-summer sunsets. Our own backyard was half wild, framed by oak trees that hung heavy over the edges of the grass before falling back into dense undergrowth. Visible behind that forested tangle of oaks and thorn bushes in the de-leafed seasons of the year, half-maintained fields waited for the right moment to burst back into forest themselves. There were hunters in those fields, but at brave moments I'd set off on my own, exploring. The fields were hemmed with wooded borders and streams, crisscrossed with tumbled stone walls, studded with glacial boulders. Sometimes, now and again, wandering in the fields and woods, I'd find an old apple tree surrounded by little bombs of wormy overripeness that splattered satisfyingly against the stones. Acorns fell everywhere. I deconstructed them with small, determined fingers, setting a table on a rock, acorn-top dishes on little mats made from peeled-away strips of birch bark. Fantastic imagined creatures would join me at that rock table, keeping me company. The woods were good for company and for narrative, a good place for yearning to a world filled with little bits of unexpected magic and secret pockets of joy.

If you were a bookish child, and you're not too far from my own age, you have also wandered the fields and woods of northwestern Connecticut, moody and grey and shot through with the promise of magic. You went there with Meg and Calvin and Charles Wallace; you climbed up the star-watching rock and ate windfallen apples while you communed with beings who knew the names of the stars. I grew up two towns over from the village in which Madeleine L'Engle had her country home. The descriptions of the place that the fictional Murrys and the Austins called home were as real and familiar to me as my own skin. I knew that landscape and the way it suggested hidden infinities, layers of meaning, a delicate balance between beauty and chaos. I also knew the profound alienation the L'Engle inscribed into her characters' relationship with their home towns. My parents were hardly Nobel Prize winners, but, like the Murrys, they were outsiders with no entry point to the social and cultural life of our little xenophobic town, which was the sort of place that people came from but never moved to.

It wasn't all bad, our isolation, though my parents were so oblivious to our outsider status that they might as well have been living in a windowless prison column on Camazotz for all they ever did to address it or ease it. But it was the 1970s, a working-class town — parental involvement was expected to be minimal. All of us kids were on our own, one way or another, wandering the streets that dead-ended into steep, scrub-covered hills where we took the sleds in winter even though we knew that one of us would end up landing in the frozen creek at the bottom. We fell in and hauled each other out. What else was there to do? We were adaptable; we tried to get by. We kept our heads down when we had to. We found our places of safety as best we could. There were other outsiders if we looked hard enough, other smart kids keeping their heads down. There were friendships of the sort that make it possible to fake it long enough to get through and get out.

But still, I knew — on the first on what would be tens of readings — that L'Engle's version of these small, oak-bound towns was the truth: I'd never feel like I belonged with the people the way I felt bound to the place. The truth was Meg Murry, with her mouse-brown hair and her ill-fitting glasses, fierce, flawed, and trembling with insecurities, completely unable to integrate herself into the fabric of the town. She never seemed to have anyone to talk to except her siblings and Calvin (whose adolescent stability and brilliance in the face of his own troubled background made him by far the most fantastical character L'Engle ever wrote). She had no ties to anyone but her family, the land, and the angels and beings that visited her there, under the trees and over the rocks.

It's been a long time since I lived there. There are oaks in the place where I live now, and hills, though the woodlots are few and far between, the hills gentle and friendly and long tamed. This is a settled place, thoroughly civilized, filled with people. It's not the most diverse place around, but it's quietly at ease with cosmopolitan truths about the range of human experience in a way that isolated rural towns can almost never manage to be. And that makes it a very different sort of growing up that my children are having here in this town, very different than the one I had thirty years ago in a town not far from the Murrys' fictional village, where Charles Wallace came home from school every day with new bruises. My own son started first grade this year. I could see bits of Charles Wallace in him as he climbed the steps to the door of the school: he's shy, introverted, an emotional tuning fork picking up everyone's broadcasted signals. He sometimes struggles to find ways to express both his ignorance and his surprising pockets of knowledge in terms that the other kids can follow. It's not easy for him; I see that. I pick him up after school and he makes it clear that he's done interacting with his peers for the day. He's worn out. I know how that goes. I used to feel the same way. But he's not beaten down. He's at peace with himself, somehow. That's something I find harder to recognize.

This place where I'm living now doesn't grab my heart the way the hills of my old home used to. I appreciate the densely gridded neighborhoods, the small parks, the way we can walk to the landmarks of our daily life. But I miss wildness. There's no place here where you might wander while imagining that you, lonely as you are, might really be at the very fulcrum of the cosmos, about to converse with angels and fallen stars. Fallen stars? In this metropolitan area, we can hardly see the stars still in the sky. To connect our kids to the vast sweep of the universe, we go to the science museum and watch the planetarium show. For my children, the cosmos is something they drive to and witness in prepared presentations.

I wonder what my kids will make of Madeleine L'Engle's books when they are older. I still love them and re-read the best of both sequences, Murrys and Austins, almost every year. But with every year that passes they seem a little more dated to me. Madeleine L'Engle is dead now, and the social milieu in which she located her cosmic fantasies has been a long time passing. Our issues have changed for the worse and the better, and the places in which we play them out look very different than they used to. The landscape has changed with the times. I don't go back to my parents' home much anymore — there are wounds that require distance for healing — but when I do, I am always a little shaken to see one more field or forest carved up, with another subdivision standing where the acorns used to fall. Every year, more of the wild places where I used to roam in all the imaginative glory of my terrible isolation are gone to houses.

I grieve those wild places, but maybe it's a trade-off. The oaks and the rocks, the Murrys and Austins — they were good company, but not better company than a welcoming community would have been. Where I live now, without magic, there is more room for human difference. Sammy may struggle with making friends, but there is no sense — not institutionally at school nor from the people he meets — that either his shyness or his intelligence make him freakish. If he went to school and talked about mitochondria, no one would beat him up at the end of the day. He doesn't have to keep his head down while he figures out who he is or how he'll make himself fit in this world.

It's very different from the way it was for me, my siblings, and the other smart kids we temporarily called friends while we were all trying to think of the quickest way out. I have hopes that my kids will have less need than I did to find secret shelter in woods and books. I wish the woods and books were there for them, still, the way they were for me. But if the woods have gone to houses, and those houses contain people who will befriend and companion my children in this world, well, maybe it's not so tragic after all.