Musing -- on the editor's mind

La Conner is 320 miles north of Harpswell, Maine. That is why the mixed hardwood-conifer forests there were so familiar to me. The 10 years I lived in Minnesota and when in Michigan during the 1980s, I walked in woods where the evergreens were Eastern white pine, northern white cedar and red juniper. While white pines could be towering, hardwoods dominated the forest: sugar maples, red and white oaks and beech.

On the train going north from Boston, I thought: The hardwoods of the northeast. How much farther north is La Conner than Boston or Portland, Maine? (I hadn’t yet calculated latitude di...