At night, now, Homer’s insomnia kept time to a new music; the winter branches of the picked apple trees rattling against each other in the early December wind made a brittle click-clack sound. Lying in his bed—a moonlight the color of bone starkly outlining his hands folded on his chest—Homer Wells thought the trees might be trying to shake the snow off their branches, in advance of the snow itself. Perhaps the trees knew that a war was coming, too, but Olive Worthington didn’t think about it.
