Quiet Nights and Quiet Stars

Quiet Nights and Quiet Stars...[You can click on that title].
When H and I are in Medford, we work in different spaces of the apartment. He uses the second bedroom that we have laid out as his office. It has a raspberry plush rug and the dining table, repurposed as a desk, with the best speakers and a row of book cases. There are three windows overlooking the alley between this two family house on a narrow street, and the next one, but the venetian blinds are generally drawn.

I work in the tiny space at the back of the apartment-- a sort of closet without doors. It is maybe 4 feet wide by 6 feet long. It has a window high over the back deck. It provides little more than indirect light, but there is something cozy about it, and it has the desk made of a door suspended over two file cabinets. There is an ancient orange wool scarf on the melamine desk/door surface and an assortment of cards and memorabilia from the wedding tacked to the wall.  We still have the remnants of our taste test of champagnes for the wedding on the white board. 

This is our home here.


In Vermont, we rent a 19th century cape that was added onto by the landlord in the 1970s or '80s. There is a garden in the backyard, and a main traffic road at the front. We never use that door. There are some plywood planks set up as an "L" on file cabinets and an old dresser that we use for a desk. When Herb is in VT, he uses the desk with the speakers, and I move to the upstairs study, a small room with a pair of high windows overlooking the garden. It is oddly like this space, though there, there are wood shelves on cinder blocks for a book case under the eaves.

It is odd that in some ways, the home we have created in these two rental spaces is defined by our work, by the books and the computer and the papers piled high and in small vortexes at our feet.

I used to live in a  place of light and airy open rooms, and then my home was in the outdoors, in the Orchard Road that I walked each day with my beloved dog, Argus.  I knew seasons and had a network of friends to whom I would wave, as they passed down West Street. I knew them by the cars they drove. But now, here, I have turned inward.  And home these days, is increasingly the pixels on a screen. It is a hard thing to say, but I had two conversations last week - both with people in VT that I feel close to. Both said in their own ways, that I am not around much these days. It was a passing remark, but it struck deep. It felt like a violation of a kind of covenant I had made with that little town where I have lived for some 12 years now.

H says that he sees our community there as the one strong leg that we stand on, while everything else is in flux, and he is right. We know that E and K will have plowed the driveway and watered the plants when we return. We know that the postmaster will have held our mail. But as I sit at the desk in Medford, I feel as though I have pulled deeper than I'd like into the little room with the high window and indirect light, into the pixels.

There is something seductive in the doing of the work that is before you, in reducing the number of messages in the in-box below 100, then a few more, and a few more, and by the end of the day, I no longer trust the weather outside the door. I have traded it for the occasional ticking of the steady-state radiator that needs no attention, no monitoring.

Writer Lisa Heschong wrote a book called Thermal Delight in Architecture. I use it in my classes. She says that as a society, we have moved away from an understanding of the power of thermal changes to link us to places. She points to the manner in which we are fond of the diurnal patterns of light, to Solstice and sunrise, to dusk and moonrise as markers of the passage of the day. Our attention lingers for a moment on a tree  or the reflected orange of the sunset in a skyline building, and we become part of the place in which we live and work. H and I once pulled over to the side of a Boston highway to watch an enormous yellow moon rise from the waters of the  Charles River into the sky. Just so, Heschong says, the power of  thermal currents in the lobby or breezeway of a commercial building, the movement of air across the skin on a humid summer day, while rocking on a porch swing. But in the steady-state places of computer-glow and steam heat, there is no thermal change as the sun goes down, nothing to draw our attention to the places in which we live.

In Vermont, where we supplement the oil heat with wood, the little room upstairs can get quite cold when our attention is drawn to the pixels on the screen which flicker constantly with that bluish glow that knows no day nor night. We can remedy the cooling room by throwing some more logs on the embers in the woodstove. Eventually, we need to go outside and get some more, stack it on the wood cart, drag the cart through the sliders, letting in the cold air from the outside. We need to remove and re-stack the wood inside, and brave the cold, taking the cart back outside again.  Sometimes the deck is icy, and we have to be aware of our footing, though not much this year.

The wood stove needs to be fed and tended and we can't withdraw into the bluish glow.

And there is a metaphor in this. Communities require tending, and as we focus inward, we lose track of the needs for stacking wood. I wonder whether there is a moment when the transition is made and we become outsiders in the places of the heart. I wonder how we recalibrate the balance, tend to the home fires, keep the stove from going cold. If we don't, we'll be just another couple of part-timers standing with only one foot on shaky ground.