When Jick's mother says the past is a taker, not a giver, what does she mean? Though things have been lost in the past, especially in the Depression years just preceding the story's setting, Elsbeth is referring to the damage of reflecting on the past. What is taken away by looking at the past? Can the past also be a giver? If so how?

At the top of page 281, Jick says "Distance and isolation create a freedom of sorts. The space to move in according to your own whims and bents. Yet it was exactly this freedom, this fact that person was a speck on the earth sea, that must have been too much for some of the settlers."

Alec, Stanley, and Wendell Williams are a few characters who display isolation. What kind of freedom do these characters have? Could they have chosen less...