A Place of My Own Read Free

keeping the place nice and toasty. Snow was more likely to keep me away than cold, since there was a hundred-yard path between the house and the building that needed to be shoveled after a blizzard.
    I loved that path, though, and the transition it afforded me as I strolled out to work every morning. My “commute” took only a few minutes, passing through the garden and under the arbor before winding around the pond and the building’s companion boulder and then depositing me at the door. But in those few minutes, sipping from a mug of coffee and checking on my plants as I winded my way, I gradually shed the cares of the household and slipped back into the current of whatever it was I was writing. I would push open the door and crank up the heater, before stepping down into what I came to think of as my cockpit. Because once I took my seat at the desk, there was no reason whatsoever to move. Like a suit of clothes, Charlie had designed the space to the measure of my body, so everything I could possibly need—books, files, supplies, heater controls, machinery—I could reach without ever having to get up from my chair. Taking my seat in the lower section of the writing house came to feel like putting on a favorite old sweater or pair of socks. It fit me to a T.
    Winter or summer, the building took on a completely different identity. Throwing open all the windows on an August afternoon—a ritual operation that involves hooking the two large in-swinging sashes to beams in the ceiling—instantly transformed the room into a screened-in porch. On a summer morning the room was delightful to work in, utterly transparent to the breeze and the sounds of birds and squirrels. But because the ceiling had no insulation, by three or so in the afternoon it sometimes got too warm to work. Oh well. The building was telling me to knock off, go for a swim, and so I did.
    “First we shape our buildings,” Winston Churchill famously said, “and thereafter our buildings shape us.” I’ve often wondered how this building shaped me and my work in the years I did all my writing in it. Certainly the books and essays I wrote here were deeply rooted in the view from my desk, firmly planted in my garden. And since I’ve left the writing house my work has ventured farther afield from the garden I used to overlook and out into the wider world. Today the view from the room where I write includes the skyline of a city, so perhaps it isn’t surprising that the writing might also have enlarged its purview, and grown a bit more political.
    When the time came to move away, I gave some serious thought to putting the writing house on a flatbed truck and bringing it with me to California. But as you will soon learn, the building was as carefully fitted to its site as it was to me, and it’s hard to imagine it displaced to an urban backyard in Berkeley. So in 2003 when we pulled up stakes in New England it stayed behind.
    But though I may have abandoned the writing house, I couldn’t bear to sell it or the house. So when we moved west we leased the place to a young couple who, like we do, work at home. Bill now works in the writing house, which he’s put to a very different purpose. Bill manages real estate for living, and has filled the little building with steel file cabinets and more office equipment—photocopiers, faxes, printers, shredders—than I would have thought it could ever hold. There’s a high-speed Internet connection now, and the place, which I try to check in on every summer, has a completely different feel to it. With the daybed piled high with file folders, the space for daydreaming has shrunk down to a cramped couple of square feet or so. What it feels like now is a crowded real-estate office plopped down in the woods.
    I miss it sorely and look forward to the day when I’ll be able to reclaim it and work in the writing house again. Still, I do spend a fair amount of imaginary time there, which is not nothing. Very often when