Well.

It has been several weeks packing, organizing the move, moving, cleaning out the old apartment, getting the basics set up here, and … getting an Internet connection.  I’m whipped.

For a move of less than six miles, this took a lot out of me.

But the distance seems a great deal more than six miles.  I have moved from a half-hour commute, hours spent running into town (for meetings, for the movies, for the kids, … ), no-yard, what passes for moderately urban here in Vermont to the a place where I can’t see my neighbors lights at night, in one hundred and eight five acres of protected land. Within ten minutes of my office in downtown Burlington.

And, when I saw this house, walked up the broad wood stairs to the typical hundred year old  second floor full of knee-walls, sloping ceilings, there was this room with a window facing the pines and the fields, in a dormer, just the right size for my desk.  White plaster walls, slightly beat up, flat three inch pine molding, wood floor.  Room enough for my books and a small couch. 

A writers room, the New England Version of the archetypal Paris starving-artist garret.

I knew this place was a home I had been looking for for a long long time.  It only took me seven years and two divorces to get here.

I remember the end of the first marriage, trying to convert a four by ten porch into a study, winding up sleeping down there at the end, amid the sheetrock and half finished wiring, the phrase "Never underestimate the effects of the physical space."

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