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In “Waking in the Dark” she writes, “The tragedy of sex / lies around us, a woodlot / the axes are sharpened for.”

He loaded heavy bags of boughs into his truck, all harvested from a friend’s woodlot, a chunk of clear-cut land that had grown in with thick, scrubby trees.

But Ms. Moran describes a certain magic about the work: bringing warm treats to eat, noticing the soft patterns in the branches, letting the children play as they work, listening for the barred owl that lives near the entrance of the woodlot.

We set out into the adjoining woodlot, wearing headlamps and crunching through leaves as a bullfrog bellowed in the background.

But David Fancy, who believes he’s sensitive to electromagnetic fields, says it’s the only thing — other than moving into a tent on a friend’s woodlot in Ontario, Canada — that helped the blinding headaches, full-body nerve pain, and brain fog he says he’d been experiencing since 2001.