Since I got to Massachusetts, I’ve spent more time outside than I have since I was a child. Massachusetts is the sixth smallest state, but its forest and park system is the sixth largest, and nearly 150,000 protected acres of land exist in Berkshire County alone. Amy Clampitt’s house is in a neighborhood, but as soon as you walk out her door, more or less, you’re in the woods, and the acres of trails are just a short drive away.

“Outside,” here, looks different than it does in Michigan, where I grew up, or Minnesota, where I live now. I’d never been to rural New England before I got here in August, unless you count a month at the MacDowell Colony. But ever since I arrived, I felt as if I had always lived here.

One reason for my comfort might be that, like all good schoolchildren, I grew up with the poetry of Robert Frost. Because his lyrics are so familiar, we forget what a good scholar he was of place and the natural world. Frost particularly loved books on botany, and when he took his children for walks around their New Hampshire farm, he insisted that they be able to identify every plant they came upon. Like Thoreau, who said, “A true account of the actual is the purest poetry,” Frost says in his poem “Mowing” that “the fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.” Though Frost’s poems sound as if they are written in the voice of a New Englander, biographer Jay Parini says that Frost always thought of his home as being California (which he left at 11), and so he wrote of New England with the clarity of an outsider.

In October, writer and naturalist Bill Roorbach was nice enough to drive over from Worcester, where he was teaching at Holy Cross, to take a walk with me and tell me what I was looking at. I’d been doing a fine job walking around “appreciating” everything for a month or two, but suddenly I was more frustrated with every afternoon. What’s that bird? Is that a yellow jackets’ nest or a wasps’ nest, hanging from that tree like that? What kind of tree is that, anyway? Why do they have these little rocky streams everywhere, when I’ve never seen one in the Midwest? Why do the rivers feel low and close, and different than they do in Minnesota? I felt as if I couldn’t read the world, and for the first time, I cared.

So Bill and I went into the Pleasant Valley Wildlife Sanctuary, and he started naming names: that’s an oven bird, here’s the difference between a hemlock and a fir and a pine, come take a look at this spring. Every thing he named had Frost line that went with it: “that he knows in singing not to sing,” “the way a crow shook down on me,” “I sha’nt be gone long — you come, too.” We were done with apple picking; we knew that something there is that does not love a wall. Time and being used to Frost sometimes make him feel a little fusty, but I was newly impressed and amazed.