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."

Many things make a marriage go bad, a fair share of the pile things that I am clearly  responsible for, but I cannot help but wonder how the story would have gone had I had a room of my own.

I remember in the second marriage … hard to figure beginning or end with that one, it was a wild ride, though brief in terms of time … I took a couple of end tables, nice ones that had flanked the marriage bed the first time round, and a nice thick slab of wood and tried to make a place where I could pay the bills, keep my papers, maybe write. 

We had a fairly large house, but it was one of these homegrown affairs, a camp and a house oddly fused together over the years.  We had spent all summer working on an upstairs bedroom/office, working fairly well together, although at about half of what I though the pace would be so we could keep the ‘process’ OK.  I had gotten tired of waiting for that to come together, and needed to sit down and balance the checkbook, sort the mounting bills. 

It didn’t go over too big.  I don’t recall exactly how it all came down, but I do recall being surprised, for I had told her what I was up do, didn’t get much in the way of objections.  Though the details escape me, what I thought would be a simple hour turned into a all day emotional ‘thing’ with one or the other of us stalking off into town ‘to go the bakery, to get coffee, like I thought we would have time to do together.’

And again, that refrain came around: ‘Don’t underestimate the effects of the physical space’. 

I am too close to the end of that one to say anything real about what actually happened - just coming out of the shell-shock really.  But it still wanders in my mind as a real possibility, what it would have been like had I a room of my own.  Something I’d hoped a partner would help me build, be OK with, a place, well, …

A place like this one.  White plaster walls, a dormer window facing the pines and Fields, filled in the mid morning with the sun.  Woodwork cut a hundred years ago, simple, plain, showing the wear of life lived.  I can walk the land in the early, sun coming up.  I can sit here and write.  In a well earned room of my own.