De Lint devotes much of his story to describing the setting, suggesting its importance to the story's wholeness. He begins one descriptive passage with the curious line, "The trees are new growth, old before their time." It takes some alertness to pick up the importance of this turn of phrase, and its meaning may only come to one after reading William's description of himself as forty-five but looking sixty. The trees themselves exemplify the people who find shelter among them—young, yet old before their time. This idea of the environment representing the people who live in it is expanded in the descriptive passage: "Scrub, leaves more brown than green, half the limbs dead, the other half dying. They struggle for existence in what was once a parking lot, a straggling clot of vegetation fed for years.....
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