CHAPTER 8

Finish Work: A Punch List

Once we’d butted the last course of shingles tight to the window casings and squeezed a bead of caulk along the joint, the building was at last sealed to the weather and Joe and I could start in on finish work. To my ear, the term had a welcome, auspicious ring, signifying as it did that we were moving indoors (it was January now, deep winter) and toward completion. This showed just how little I understood about the meaning of finish work, however, for nothing else in house building takes quite as long. I automatically assumed the primary meaning of the term to be temporal (Hey, we must be nearly finished!), but of course finishing in carpentry also has a spatial meaning, having to do with an exalted level of refinement in the joining and dressing of interior wood. In fact, this turns out to be so time-consuming it’s apt to make finishing in the other sense of the word seem like a receding, ungraspable mirage.

Progress slows. Or at least it appears to, since it is by now such a subtle thing, measured in increments of smoothness and craftsmanship and in to-do lists done rather than in changes at the scale of a landscape or elevation. No one big thing, finish work consists of a great variety of discrete tasks, many niggling, some inspiring, but none you would call heroic. And yet, day by day, each task checked off moves you another notch down the punch list, that much closer to move-in day, when the time of building ends and the time of habitation begins. Joe and I would spend the better part of a year finishing the writing house.

Framing by comparison is epic work—the raising from the ground of a whole new structure in a matter of days. There’s poetry in finish work too, but it’s a small, domestic sort of poetry, which I suppose is appropriate enough. Building the desk, trimming out the windows, sanding and rubbing oil into wood surfaces to raise their grain and protect them, is slow, painstaking work that seems to take place well out of earshot of the gods. High ritual might attend the raising of a ridge beam, but who ever felt the need to bless a baseboard molding, or say a little prayer over the punch list?

No, finish work takes place in the realm of the humanly visible and tactile, and it is chiefly this that accounts for its laboriousness. Its concern is with the intimate, inescapable surfaces of everyday life—the desk one faces each morning, with its achingly familiar wood-grain figures, the sill on which an elbow or coffee cup habitually rests—and any lapse of attention here will leave its mark, if not on the land, then certainly on the texture of a few thousand days. Where being off by an eighth or a sixteenth of an inch was good enough when we were nailing shingles or spacing two-by-fours, the acceptable margins of error and imperfection had by now dwindled to nothing. Now we dealt in thirty-seconds of an inch, and strove for “drive fits” in wood joints that take the tap of a mallet to secure; now even hairline gaps rankle, and at close quarters indoors the eye can distinguish eighty-eight degrees from ninety. Fortunately one’s education in carpentry follows a course that makes the achievement of such exactitude at least theoretically plausible. Each stage in the building process demands a progressively higher level of refinement and skill, as the novice moves from framing to cladding to shingling and then finally to finish work, so that at this point in the construction I should have hammered enough nails and cut enough lengths of lumber to know how to do the job right. Theoretically.

Owing to the peculiarities of Charlie’s design, the finish work called for in my building was not “normal,” in Joe’s estimation. In some ways it was more challenging than the usual—there were all the built-ins to be built (the desk, the daybed, the shelves), and an “articulated” structure such as this always makes it more difficult for the carpenter to cover his tracks with trim or wallboard, carpentry’s blessed absolutions. But in other ways the finish work promised to be relatively simple—a little too simple, as far as Joe was concerned. Finish is where a carpenter usually gets to show off his craftsmanship, and Charlie hadn’t left much scope for the exercise of Joe’s virtuosity with the jigsaw or router.

The plans called for a bare minimum of trim, for example, and what there was of it was fairly straightforward—not an ogee, fillet, or coping in sight. Only a small section of the walls—the area immediately surrounding the daybed—would be closed in, with narrow boards of clear white pine. The windows were supposed to be trimmed out with one-inch strips of the same clear pine, just enough to bridge the quarter-inch gap between post and casing. There were no baseboard moldings, unless you count the Doug-fir kick plate facing the bottommost bookshelf. And the plywood-and-two-by-four fin walls that held the bookshelves were to be sanded and oiled but left untrimmed: the “ornament” here, such as it was, consisted of the way the vertical two-by-four at the front of each fin wall came three-quarters of an inch proud of the exposed edge of the plywood that faced its sides.

At least since the day that modernism turned Viennese architect Adolph Loos’s silly declaration that “ornament is crime” into a battle cry, the whole issue of trim has been a heated one in architecture, and Joe’s and my differences in outlook on this question were bound to come to a head sooner or later. On the one and only day Joe worked on the building by himself (I was out of town), he trimmed out a pair of the little peak windows with a fancy picture-frame molding, an expertly mitered piece of handiwork he was tremendously proud of. The day I got back he phoned to see what I thought of it. It was true that the drawings were somewhat vague on Charlie’s intention here, but it seemed to me Joe’s solution was too decorative for this building, and I very gingerly told him so. It took two weeks and all the diplomatic skill I could muster before we could even talk about actually replacing it, and even then the discussion came down to his inevitable half-surly, half-sulking shrug of resignation and challenge: “Mike, it’s your building.” But for some reason this time around Joe’s big line, calculated to put me on the defensive and check Charlie’s authority, struck my ears differently than it had before. Had I said anything about Charlie? No!—it was by my lights that Joe’s trim looked wrong. So, to put an end to the discussion, I simply said, “Joe, you’re right: It is my building.”

And yet it wasn’t, not yet. Because although I’d worked on the building for more than two years, and although move-in day was in sight, the building still didn’t feel like it was mine, not in any meaningful sense. I might have dreamed up the program and paid all the bills, but this was Charlie’s design we had been building, and, let’s face it, even now I would be lost without Joe’s help—it was doubtful I could finish alone. For very good reasons, Joe and Charlie both seemed to feel more proprietary about the building than I did—which is why the two of them were by this point incapable of exchanging an untesty word. But in all the time I’d spent mediating their warring claims, I hadn’t really ever asserted my own.

There was some sort of key to the building that was still missing, I felt, something that was needed in order to make it truly mine, and I began to wonder if this key might not have to do with time. Finishing didn’t mean the same thing to Joe and Charlie as it did to me: I wasn’t going to be finished with this building the day the building inspector wrote out the certificate of occupancy and the two of them headed home for the last time, turning over this page in their lives; nor was the building going to be finished with me. I alone would be accompanying it into the future, and it would be accompanying me. A not un-obvious thought, perhaps, yet it helped me to appreciate that the last thing these last surfaces and their finishes were was “superficial”; they were precisely where the building and I would spend the next however-many years rubbing up against one another, and possibly even rubbing off. Made right, these walls, this floor, this desk, might someday come to fit me as well as an old pair of shoes, be just as expressive of my daily life; feel as much mine, I mean, as a second skin. Yet is it possible to make such a thing? I wasn’t sure, but if it was, I decided, it would involve paying some closer attention—even now, before it was finished—to the life of the building in time.

image TIME AND PLACE

Time is not something architects talk about much, except in the negative. The common view seems to be that mortal time is what buildings exist to transcend; being immortal (at least compared to their builders), buildings give us a way to leave a lasting mark, to conduct a conversation across the generations, in Vincent Scully’s memorable formulation. I doubt there are many builders or architects in history who would dispute Le Corbusier’s dictum that the first aim of architecture is to defy time and decay—to make something in space that time’s arrow cannot pierce.

Or even scuff, in the case of Le Corbusier and many of his contemporaries. The modernists were avid about making buildings that had as little to do with time as possible, time future as much as time past. That modernist buildings strove to sever their ties to history is well known. But if modernism was a dream of a house unhaunted by the past, its designers seemed equally concerned to inoculate their buildings against the future. They designed and built them in such a way as to leave as little scope as possible for the sort of changes that the passing of time has always wrought on a building—namely, the effects of nature outside, and of the owners within.

Defying the time of nature meant rejecting stone and wood, those symbols of the architectural past that have traditionally been prized for the graceful way they weather and show their age. Modernists preferred to clad their buildings in a seamless, white, and very often machined surface that was intended to look new forever. What this meant in practice, however, was an exterior that didn’t so much weather as deteriorate, so that today the white building stained brown, by rust or air pollution, stands in most of the world’s cities as a melancholy symbol of modernist folly. In architecture, time’s objective correlative is grime.

Inside, too, modernists employed all sorts of novel, untested materials to which time has been unkind. But the important modernist attack on time indoors was less direct, and this had to do with human time, which in buildings takes the form of inhabitation. The modernists were the first architects in history to insist that they design the interiors of their houses down to the very last detail—not only the finish trims, which in the past had usually been left to the discretion of craftsmen, but the bookshelves and cabinets (“Farewell the chests of yesteryear,” Le Corbusier declared), the furniture and window treatments, and even in some cases the light switches and teapots and ashtrays. “Built-ins” became the order of the day. Everything that was conceivably designable the architect now wanted to design, the better to realize his building’s Gestalt, a German word for totality much bandied about in the Bauhaus. Had there been a way to somehow redesign the bodies of the inhabitants to fit in better with the Gestalt of their new house, no doubt these architects would have given it a try.

As it was, the architects fretted over what the owners would do to their works of art, which, most of them agreed, would never again be as perfect as the day before move-in day. It is this pristine moment that became—and remains—the all-important one for modern architecture: the day the finished but not-yet-inhabited building gets its picture taken, freezing it in time. After that, it’s downhill. “Very few of the houses,” Frank Lloyd Wright once complained, were “anything but painful to me after the clients moved in and, helplessly, dragged the horrors of the old order along after them.”

What exactly does a totalitarian approach to the details of modern architecture have to do with time? Wright’s “horrors of the old order” and Corbusier’s “chests of yesteryear” give the game away. As inevitably as weathering, the process of inhabiting a space leaves the marks of time all over it, and so constitutes a declension from the architect’s ideal. A house that welcomes our stuff—our furniture and pictures, our keepsakes and other “horrors”—is one that we have been invited in some measure to help create or finish; ultimately such a house will tell a story about us, individuals with a history.

Modernists often designed their interiors not so much for particular individuals as for Man; they regarded the addition of clients’ stuff as a subtraction from a creation they thought of as wholly their own. This is one legacy of modernism that we have yet to overcome; our stuff, and in turn our selves, still very often have trouble gaining a comfortable foothold in a modern interior. Even now most of them seem designed to look their best uninhabited. Stewart Brand, the author of a recent book on preservation called How Buildings Learn, tells of asking one architect what he learned from revisiting his buildings. “Oh, you never go back,” the architect said, surprised at the question. “It’s too discouraging.” For many contemporary architects, time is the enemy of their art.

In The Timeless Way of Building, Alexander writes that “those of us who are concerned with buildings tend to forget too easily that all the life and soul of a place…depend not simply on the physical environment, but on the pattern of events which we experience there”—everything from the transit of sunlight through a room to the kinds of things we habitually do in it. J. B. Jackson makes a similar point in his essay “A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time,” where he argues that we pay way too much attention to the design of places, when it is what we routinely do in them that gives them their character. “It is our sense of time, our sense of ritual” and everyday occurrence, he writes, “which in the long run creates our sense of place.”

Certainly when I think about spaces that I remember as having a strong sense of place, it isn’t the “architecture” that I picture, the geometrical arrangements of wood and stone and glass, but such things as watching the world go by from the front porch of the general store in town, or the scuffle of ten thousand shoes making their way to work beneath Grand Central Station’s soaring vault, or the guttering light of jack-o’-lanterns illuminating the faces of square dancers in a New England hayloft. The “design” of these places and the recurring events that give them their qualities—the spaces and the times—have grown together in such a way that it is impossible to bring one to mind without the other.

Jackson is doubtful that architects can design memorable places like these, at least on purpose; for him habitation will trump design every time, and that is how it should be. Certainly it is true that some of the best places are not made so much as remade, as people find new and unforeseen ways to inhabit them over time. Alexander, an architect himself, has more faith that an architect can design the “great good place,” but not entirely by himself and probably not all at once. This is because no single individual can possibly know enough to make from scratch something as complex and layered and thick as a great place; for the necessary help, he will need to invoke the past, and also the future.

The first move is obvious enough: The architect borrows from the past by adapting successful patterns, the ones that have been proven to support the kind of life the place hopes to house—porches and watching the world go by, for example. But what about the time to come? There is of course the time of weathering: age seems to endear a building to people, to strengthen its sense of place, and the choice of materials can give an architect a way to either flout or abet this process. But it seems to me there is another, more profound way an architect can open a building to the impress of its future. Forswearing a totalitarian approach to its details, the architect can instead leave just enough play in his design for others to “finish it”—first the craftsmen, with their particular knowledge and sense of the place, and then the inhabitants, with their stuff and with the incremental changes that, over time, the distinctive grooves of their lives will wear into its surfaces and spaces. It may be that making a great place, as opposed to a mere building or work of architectural art, requires a collaboration not so much in space as over time.

image THE UNFINISHED HOUSE

For a long time after the renovation of our house was finished and Judith and I had moved back in, whenever Charlie came to visit he had a disconcerting habit of staring at the walls, absently. “What are you looking at?” I would ask, worried he had spotted some grave flaw in construction. “Oh, nothing…nothing,” he’d blandly insist, and then rejoin the conversation for a while, until after a decent interval his gaze would once again float off, catching on the bookshelves, or the painting we’d hung in the breakfast room.

We realized eventually that it was our stuff he was staring at, and we began to kid him about it. Only with the greatest reluctance did he finally admit that the way we’d arranged our books and things on the living room shelves was, well, not quite how he’d imagined it. It seems we hadn’t adjusted quite enough of the adjustable shelves, so that the living room wall didn’t have the proper mix of big and little spaces; he could imagine a much more satisfactory rhythm of upright, leaning, and laying-down volumes, punctuated with the occasional lamp or picture frame. By giving us a whole wall with adjustable shelves, Charlie had given us the freedom to complete the design of the living room; now that we had, it was all he could do not to get up and finish the job himself. I told him I’d always thought the nice thing about freedom was that nobody could tell you what to do with it.

For the contemporary architect, trained as he is to think of himself as a species of modern artist, surrendering control of his creation is never easy, no matter what he professes to believe about the importance of collaboration. Even Christopher Alexander takes an authoritarian turn in the end, laying down inflexible rules for the minimum depth of a porch (six feet) or the maximum width of a piece of finish trim (one-half inch). There isn’t an architect alive who doesn’t approvingly quote Mies van der Rohe’s line that “God is in the details” (never mind that most other people credit the line to Flaubert). What strikes me as odd about this aphorism as applied to architecture is not so much the apotheosis of the detail as its implied identification of the architect with God. Even Charlie, who resists the monomaniacal tendencies of his profession, fought Judith for more Charlie-designed built-ins (she prefers old furniture), left almost no wall space for paintings (Judith is a painter), and proposed that he design not only the closet doors and medicine cabinets and towel racks (all of which we agreed to) but also the toilet-paper holders (which is where we finally drew the line). Much as he might theoretically want to, the modern architect is loath to leave anything to chance or time, much less to the dubious taste of carpenters and clients.

A superficial glance at the blueprints for my writing house might lead one to conclude that it represents a stark example of totalitarian architecture. Not counting my chair, everything in it has been designed: the bookshelves, the daybed, the desk—all are built in. On the blueprints Charlie even sketched in the books on the shelves, as if to suggest the correct ratio of upright to sideways volumes (with a few casual leaners—at precisely sixty degrees—thrown in for good measure). But even though the plans are highly detailed, that conclusion would be incorrect. In ways I was just beginning to appreciate, he had left plenty of space in the design for the passing of time and the impress of craftsmanship and habitation to finish it. Joe had grasped this right away—that was what his window trim was all about.

Charlie’s finicky drawings of them notwithstanding, my building’s two thick walls were where its design was perhaps most open, if not to our craftsmanship, then to my inhabitation of the place. By sketching an arrangement of my books on his blueprints, Charlie wasn’t so much trying to impose a shelving policy on me as he was tacitly acknowledging the crucial part my stuff would play in establishing the look and tone of this room.

That my books were an integral part of the interior design I understood as soon as Joe and I built the shelves. Though technically “finished,” they didn’t look at all that way; the long walls stacked with empty plywood cubicles seemed skeletal and characterless, blank. And the walls were going to remain blank until I’d filled them with my books and things; only then would the thick walls actually feel thick, would the building answer to Charlie’s basic conception of it as “a pair of bookshelves with a roof over it.”

And even then the building would continue to evolve in important ways, because most of the materials and finishes Charlie had specified were the kind that time conspicuously alters. Outside, the cedar shingles would gently silver as they weathered; more slowly, the skeleton of oiled fir inside promised to redden and warm, and the white pine walls and trim would eventually turn the color of parchment. Except for its windowpanes and hardware, the building was made entirely of wood, the material most tightly bound to time. Its grain records its past, ring by annual ring, and though the tree stops growing when it’s cut, it doesn’t stop developing and changing. “Acquiring character” is what we say it’s doing, as a wood surface absorbs our oils and accumulates layers of grime, as it is dignified by use and time. I’d told Charlie in my first letter I wanted a building that was less like a house than a piece of furniture; he’d designed a place that promised to age like one.

image THE WRITING DESK

In the case of my writing desk, however, Charlie seemed to have pushed this whole notion of “acquiring character” a bit too far. He had specified we build the desk out of a thick slab of clear white pine. I hadn’t paid much attention to the choice until I happened to mention it to Jim Evangelisti one afternoon in his shop and uncorked a gusher of antiarchitect invective along with a lecture on a few things about wood he felt I needed to know.

I’d returned to Jim’s shop because he’d agreed to let me run my floorboards through his planer and joiner—no small favor, since the boards in question were more than two hundred years old and studded with iron nails hidden beneath a crust of grime. The boards had already done a stint as a barn floor somewhere—probably in a hayloft, Jim guessed, from the fact that the wood showed so little evidence of hoof traffic. These were stupendous pieces of pine; many of them were knotless and close to two feet wide, meaning they’d been cut from the kind of old-growth trees that survive in New England today chiefly as legends. My parents had found a stack of these boards in their barn and offered them to Judith and me when we were renovating the house; there’d been just enough left over to floor the writing house. The remaining boards were badly caked with dirt and coats of milk paint, however. I’d test-sanded a couple of them, but this had left the wood looking a bit too self-consciously rustic for a building that made no bones about being new. So I tried taking the boards down an eighth of an inch with a plane, where I found clean wood of a clarity and warmth I’d never seen before. It looked like pale honey, or tea.

As Jim and I ran the boards through his planer, raising a nasty plume of shavings that smelled as old as the world—a wild perfume of attic, must, fungus, and lilac—we sneezed and talked about woods. Jim said that the boards appeared to be mixed to him—some were white pine, but others looked more like yellow pine, a harder though less desirable Southern species. Knotty and prone to twisting, yellow pine is difficult to work and notoriously hard on tools. Jim mentioned in passing that he still occasionally heard an old-timer call the wood by its old nickname: “nigger pine.” The label might not have struck a nineteenth-century ear quite as violently as it does ours, but it’s a safe bet no flattery of the wood was intended.

Jim made it clear he thought building a desk out of white pine was nuts; “Only an architect…” etc., etc. The wood was just too soft, he said; in no time it would be nicked and pitted and horribly scratched. I’d actually once raised the issue of wear with Charlie, after Joe had mentioned something about it, but Charlie had been unconcerned; indeed, that was precisely the idea, he’d told me, to have a surface that would very rapidly acquire a history.

“Think of those great old marked-up wooden desks we had in elementary school,” Charlie’d said, growing animated as he spoke. “Remember how you’d scratch your initials in them with a Bic pen, try to decipher what last year’s kid had written. Every one of those desks told a story.” It was a romantic notion, and I’d fallen for it. Jim didn’t, however, and not only because he was a woodworker for whom the prospect of a perfectly good piece of furniture being gouged at by Bic-wielding schoolchildren held no romance whatsoever. A white pine desk was so soft, he said, that it would take the impression of a ballpoint through several sheets of paper, which was more history than I probably wanted. I’d be unable to write on my desk by hand without a blotter.

“And by the way,” Jim added, “those desks in elementary school? They’re made out of maple, not pine.”

This pretty much sank Charlie’s desk idea as far as I was concerned; maple is rock compared to pine.

So if not white pine, then what? I was pretty much on my own with this one. Jim nominated maple, and showed me a counter-top he was building. The wood was almost white, with virtually no discernible grain to it. It made me think of Danish Modern, that kind of sleek blond surface you saw so much of in the sixties—a decidedly unwoody wood, and way too contemporary for this place. What about cherry? It seemed kind of fancy for an outbuilding; I worried it would stand out too much against the workaday fir and plywood. Charlie had said the desk should be of a piece with the other kinds of woods that made up the building, and not too “zippy.” So maybe oak? Oak desks were eminently hard and venerable (and not at all zippy), but there’s something about the wood that rubs me the wrong way. Oak is almost too woody a wood, the wood you see whenever someone wants to say “wood”—by now it’s as much a signifier as a thing. It’s been simulated so often, in fast-food furniture and hotel case goods, that even the genuine article has begun to look a little fake. Running through the various options, dropping by Jim’s shop now and again to look over a sample, I was struck by the amount of cultural freight the various wood species had been made to carry, at least the ones we’ve seen fit to bring indoors. Selecting a wood for an interior means weighing not only the species’ appearance and material qualities, but also the history of its use and whatever architectural fashions have imprinted themselves on it—the mark that Danish Modern has left on maple, say, or Arts and Crafts on oak.

On one of my visits to Jim’s, flipping through his racks of furniture stock, I pulled one pale board that wasn’t instantly identifiable but which, after I’d raised its grain with a drop of saliva, seemed oddly familiar. I asked him what I was looking at. White ash—of course. I knew it from a hundred garden-tool handles and, back much farther than that, from all those long moments spent in on-deck circles studying the sweeping grain and burnt-in logo on the loin of a Louisville Slugger. I picked up a short length of the ash and realized I had a specific sense memory of its weight, which always takes me slightly by surprise; the wood’s paleness prepares your hand for something light, on the order of pine, but ash has a real heft to it, and I knew it to the ounce.

Jim said ash was a fine choice for a desk, even though you didn’t see it used that way too often. The wood was hard and wore nicely, yellowing slightly over time, its cream color turning to butter. I asked if I could take a piece of it home.

When I mentioned the idea of ash to Charlie, he was dubious at first, worried it might have the same contemporary associations that maple has, since it was nearly that white. But when I sanded my sample and rubbed a little tung oil into it, the hue of the wood grew warmer. It became apparent that its grain was far more vivid than maple’s, with loose, shadowy springwood rings standing out from the intervening regions of dense white summerwood. The pattern and the hue both reminded me of rippled beach sand.

I liked the look of the ash, and also the fact that the wood had no obvious stylistic associations. It made you think of tools before interiors, which I counted a plus, since this was after all a working surface I was making—a tool of a kind. I looked up “ash” in a couple of reference books, and what I read about the tree, which happens to be well represented on my land, gave me a fresh respect for it.

The variety of uses to which white ash has been put is truly impressive, the result of the wood’s unusual combination of strength and suppleness: Though hard, it is also pliant enough to take the shapes we give it and to absorb powerful blows without breaking. In addition to baseball bats and a great assortment of tools (including the handles of trowels, hammers, axes, and mallets and the shanks of scythes), I read that ash trees have been recruited over the years for church pews and bowling alleys, the D-handles of spades and shovels and the felloes, or rims, of wooden wheels (the wood obligingly holds its curve when steamed and bent), the oars and keels of small boats, garden and porch furniture, the slats of ladder-back chairs and the seats of swings, pump handles and butter-tub staves, archaic weapons of war including spears, pikes, battle-axes, lances, arrows, and cross-bows (some treaties gave Indians the right to cut ash on any land in America, no matter who owns it), snowshoes, ladder rungs, the axles of horse-drawn vehicles (the first automobiles and airplanes had ash frames), and virtually every piece of sports equipment that is made out of wood, including hockey sticks, javelins, tennis rackets, polo mallets, skis, parallel bars, and the runners on sleds and toboggans.

From the admiring accounts I read, one might conclude that white ash is up there with the opposable thumb in driving the advance of human civilization. It’s hard to think of a wood more obliging to man than ash—a tree that supplies the handles for the very axes used to cut down other trees. The reason ash makes such a satisfactory tool handle is that, in addition to its straight grain and supple strength, the wood is so congenial to our hands, wearing smooth with long use and hardly ever splintering. Ash is as useful, necessary, and dependable as work itself, and perhaps for that reason it is no more glamorous. As a tree, I confess I’d always taken the ash pretty much for granted, probably because it grows like a weed around here. But now I was sold. I would make my desk out of the most common tree on the property, the very tree that the window over my desk looked out on.

 

Ash boards proved somewhat harder to find than ash trees; it seems that most of the board feet cut each year go to makers of tools and sports equipment. Eventually I tracked down a local lumber mill, Berkshire Wood Products, that had a small quantity of native white ash in stock, mixed lengths of five quarter. (Charlie and Joe had both told me I’d be better off with native stock; having already been acclimated to the local air, it would be less likely to check or warp or otherwise surprise.)

Berkshire Wood Products consists of a small collection of ramshackle barns and sheds at the end of a long dirt road in the woods just over the state line in Massachusetts. The place had a distinct old-hippie air about it, with a big vegetable garden out front that was mulched with composted sawdust. Though only a tiny operation, the mill performed every step of the lumber-making process itself, cutting down the tree, milling the logs, kiln-drying the lumber, and dressing the planks to order.

The yardman invited me to select the boards I wanted, pointing to the very top of a three-story-tall rack that filled a large barn. To get to the ash I had to climb a scaffold, moving past handsome rough-sawn slabs of walnut, cherry, white pine, tulip wood, red oak, and yellow birch—most of the important furniture woods of the Northeastern forest. Many of the boards still had their bark, making them look more like tree slices than lumber. I reached the stack of ash and it was gorgeous stuff: eight-foot lengths of creamy white lumber, a handful of the boards set off with elliptical galaxies of nut-brown heartwood stretching out along the grain. Evidently brown heartwood is considered undesirable in ash, because when I expressed particular interest in these boards, the foreman offered to give me a discount.

Only after toting up the total board-foot price did the yardman begin dressing the lumber, much as if I were buying whole fishes I wanted filleted. Working together, he and I ran the best face of each board through the planer several times to remove the rotary scars left by the sawmill, and then used a laser-guided table saw to trim the boards lengthwise, removing the bark and wane and creating the perfectly straight and parallel edges I would need to join the boards cleanly. I realized from his banter that the yardman took me for a carpenter rather than a hobbyist; had I become so conversant in wood that I could actually pass? I loaded the ash in the back of my station wagon and headed home.

Our plan was to glue six of the boards together to make a big, roughly dimensioned plank from which we could then cut out the precise shape of the desk. As we lined up the boards on the floor I decided which ones I liked best and considered where in the finished desktop these should fall. Joe encouraged me to take my time about it: “You’re going to have to live with these boards a long time.” He clomped away while I ordered and reordered the boards, searching for the most pleasing pattern of grain and figuration. In my parents’ living room when I was growing up, there was an English walnut coffee table made by a Japanese woodworker named Nakashima, and the Rorschach-like burls and figures of that surface, which reminded me at various times of clouds and animals and monstrous faces, are printed on my memory as few images from that time are; I can still picture them, vivid and intimate as birthmarks. So I took my sweet time about it, making sure that the most interesting figures fell where, daydreaming at my desk, I would be able to dwell on them.

Once I was satisfied with the arrangement of boards, we painted their edges with wood glue, pressed them up against one another, and then secured the assembly with a pair of clamps, tightening until buttery beads of glue weeped from the seams. In a couple of hours, these six ash boards would be for all purposes one. We gave the assembly overnight to cure and then rough-sanded the surface with Joe’s belt sander, smoothing out the joints and removing the dried pearls of glue that had collected along the seams.

Now came the hard and truly harrowing part: cutting the slab to fit the building. Not only did the main section of the desk have to wrap around a corner post and fin wall at either end, but its back edge had to be cut into a toothy pattern matching the two-by-four studs beneath the window. This is how it had to look:

image

And this is the platonic version of the desktop’s configuration. I probably don’t have to mention that none of what appear in this drawing to be right angles could be exactly that in reality: the cutaway at upper right had to fit the notoriously twisted corner post—the probable cause of our unending headache—and the wing on either side had to be subtly trapezoidal, the right one a couple degrees less subtle than the left. The shape of this desk, in other words, represented the ultimate wages of our original geometrical sin. Less obvious but at least as perilous to our success was the fact that we had to work from the precise mirror image of this design penciled onto the underside of the desktop, since it is an axiom of woodworking that one always cuts from the back side of a finished wood surface in order to prevent the teeth of the saw from marring it.

Any significant error would mean driving back to Berkshire Products and starting all over again.

The day we cut the main section of the desk I remember as the day without small talk; not since my SATs had I put in so many consecutive hours of relentless, single-minded concentration. The subject of this particular test may only have been Euclidean geometry, but there were some hard problems on it calling for the rotation of an imaginary—and radically asymmetrical—object in space, and you weren’t allowed to use an eraser, either. So we measured every cut three, sometimes four times, interrogating each other’s every move, checking and rechecking lengths and angles and then reversals of angles before even contemplating picking up a saw. We worked in slow motion and virtual silence, every word between us a number. Joe actually gave gun control a rest, that was one good thing. The other was that the saw blade drew from the ash a faint breath of burnt sugar and popcorn.

We had taken care to leave each cut at least a blade’s-width too long, this being the only conceivable side to err on, so it took several tries before we managed to pound the desktop down into its tight and tricky pocket, but at last, and with a terrific screeching complaint of wood against wood, it went in. A drive fit. Not quite perfect—there were eighth-inch gaps here and there—but a damned sight closer than I’d ever thought we’d come. A rush of relief is what we mainly felt, our high-fives more exhausted than exultant, but they were no less sweet for that. Though I ran the risk of offending Joe by seeming so surprised, the job we’d done on this desk looked downright professional: here was an actual piece of furniture, and we’d made it. “Careful,” he cautioned, “a guy could get hurt patting himself on the back like that.”

I felt like we’d crossed over a crest of some kind, and from way up here the road ahead sloped down nicely, looking like it might even be smooth.

image THE METAPHYSICS OF TRIM

And for a while it was. The following weeks saw steady progress, no disasters. We laid and finished the floor, framed the steps and the daybed, and closed in the rear wall around the daybed with four-inch strips of clear pine. One unseasonably warm March Saturday we moved the operation outdoors, building and hanging the wooden visor over the front window. Charlie had said the cap visor would substantially alter the character of the building, and that it did, relaxing the formality of its classical face, giving it a definite outlook and a personality that seemed much more approachable. “You know, Mike, this building’s starting to look like you,” Joe announced after the visor went up; he was leaning back in an exaggerated way to fit me and the building into a frame formed with his hands, as if searching for the family resemblance. “Must be the baseball cap,” I said.

Joe and I worked methodically and well, achieving an easy collaboration on many of those early spring days. I began to feel less like a helper than a partner, and we traded off tasks depending on our mood rather than on the likelihood of my screwing up something important. I noticed that my finish nails seldom bent anymore (a good thing, too, when you’re nailing lengths of clear pine that cost $2 a linear foot), and the circular saw had lost its ability to startle me with short cuts or seize-ups. My grasp of wood behavior was daily growing surer, and I’d internalized all of Joe’s sawing saws, which now played in my head like a cautionary mantra: Measure twice cut once, consider all the consequences, remember to count the kerf (the extra eighth of an inch removed by the saw blade itself). As I grew more confident about making field decisions, phone calls to Charlie became infrequent, until one day, concerned about the long spell of radio silence from the job site, Charlie called me to see if there was anything we needed. Not that I could think of; we were rolling along. Some days I even got to be the head carpenter in charge, Joe manning the chop saw while I called for lengths of lumber. What it felt like now was a pretty good job, one poised on that fine-point where it is no longer daunting yet still reliably supplies days of novelty and challenge. The hours slipped by, and the end of each workday brought the satisfaction of markable progress and the solidifying conviction that this building was going to get done.

Our happy march down the punch list came to a sudden halt one evening late that spring, when Joe phoned to say he’d broken his hand at work and wouldn’t be able to work for three months, possibly longer. He’d been carrying a long stack of two-by-eights when the lumber bumped into something and spasmed, wrenching his hand so far backward that it shattered his metacarpal bone. The doctors had screwed a steel plate to the back of his hand to hold the bone together and warned him not to use it for at least three months. “The only good thing about this I can think of,” Joe’d said, bleakly, “is that now I can slip a .45 through an airport metal detector.”

I automatically assumed that work on the building would simply halt until Joe’s hand was healed. But then I decided that would be just too pathetic. Was I still so dependent on Joe? Of the finish work left to do, I could think of very little that required two men; whatever tools I still needed could be borrowed. I decided that the only self-respecting way to interpret Joe’s injury was as a sign it was time to be working on my own.

So the next morning I set to work, solo, if not exactly alone. I started out with easy stuff, cutting lengths of number-two pine on the chop saw and nailing them to the wall beneath my desk, which promised to hide any mistakes in its shadow. But this work went so smoothly that I decided, what the hell, why don’t you see if you can’t figure out how to trim a window. And this is what I set out to do the following day, working at a pace so excruciatingly deliberate it would undoubtedly have gotten me fired had I not been the boss. But turtling through the work as I did seemed in itself an accomplishment for me, to lay by my ordinary haste and move through a single day as a more patient and deliberate kind of person. I talked to myself the whole time, too, narrating the play-by-play in a rapt murmur I recognized from televised golf.

The syntax of window trim is sternly inflexible, and I reviewed each step of the procedure aloud as if giving instructions to a child, making absolutely sure to cut and nail each trim piece according to the stipulated chronology: skirt first; stool, or sill, on top of that; then a molding up each side; and finally a crown piece butt-jointed across the top of those. By the end of the day I had one perfectly respectable windowsill to my credit, and, between my ears, this gigantic, brain-crowding balloon of pride.

After successfully trimming out another window or two, I found I could get the job done without the chorus of supervisory voices, and my thoughts took their accustomed more speculative turn. The better part of one afternoon I spent trying to decide whether trim was the italics of building, serving to underscore a window or door, or, since trim was also used to bridge dissimilar surfaces and gloss over mistakes, was it instead the transitional phrase—one of those clauses that allows a writer to leap from one idea to another, covering over gaps in logic or narrative with a few cheap words? I concluded trim could be either.

My building had little if any italic trim, and a minimum of transitional or glossing-over trim, certainly fewer pieces of it than there were mistakes in need of forgiveness. As I nailed narrow strips of pine to the window casings, covering the gap between casing and post, I passed the time considering the relationship between trim and human fallibility. To trim, I decided, is human, which probably explains the modernists’ contempt for it. Because if we’re not using trim to hide our poor craftsmanship, we’re using it to proclaim our fine craftsmanship—either way, sloth or pride, trim embodies the most human of failings and thereby spoils the supreme objectivity that modernists strove for.

The machine was supposed to allow us to dispense with trim altogether, by achieving perfect joints beyond the skill of any craftsman. In practice, however, the seamless, untrimmed interior proved as elusive as most other modernist goals: To build to the exacting tolerances seamlessness demanded was prohibitively expensive. The real world holds a powerful brief for trim, it seems. Many modernists also found themselves forced back on the rhetorical possibilities of trim as a way to help “express” the structure of their buildings when simply revealing it wasn’t a realistic option. Mies decided to trim the exterior of the Seagram building with purely decorative I-beams when the building code forced him to cake the real ones in layers of unsightly fire retardant.

But even in places where the ideal of trimlessness has been realized, many people have sensed something cold, if not inhuman, in the achievement. Trim seems to speak to our condition, and not only as mistake-makers. Christopher Alexander suggests that its deeper purpose may be to provide a bridge between the simple shapes and proportions of our buildings and a human realm of greater complexity and intimacy. By offering the eye a hierarchy of intermediate-sized shapes, finish trim helps us to make a comfortable perceptual transition from the larger-than-life scale of the whole to the familiar bodily scale of windows and doors, all the way down to the intimate scale of moldings as slender as our fingers. The mathematician and chaos theorist Benoit Mandelbroit makes a similar point when he criticizes modernist architecture for failing to bridge the perceptual distance between its “unnaturally” simple forms and the human scale. Mandelbroit suggests that architectural ornament and trim appeal to us because they offer the eye a complex and continuous hierarchy of form and detail, from the exceedingly fine to the massive, that closely resembles the complex hierarchies we find in nature—in the structure of a tree or a crystal or an animal.

Though plainly not a modernist building, my writing house did exhibit a couple of puzzlingly modernist features: its more or less transparent structure, for example, and its relative lack of trim. But if Alexander and Mandelbroit were right, then the building’s own modest scale, as well as the intricate hierarchy of detail that organizes its structure—from the big corner posts to the midsize fin walls down to the exposed three-quarter-inch edge of their plywood faces—meant there was no need for trim to provide transitions from one scale to another or to complexify a shape that would otherwise have seemed “unnaturally” simple. The building was human enough without it.

Nor was Charlie particularly concerned that Joe and I hide our every mistake behind a piece of trim. On the subject of error he liked to quote Ruskin, who had defended the craftsman against the inhumanity of the machine by declaring that “No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.” No misunderstandings here. One time when I asked Charlie whether or not I should install a piece of trim over one particularly unfortunate gap that a mistake of mine had breached between a fin wall and the desk, he argued against it on the grounds trim here would be too finicky. “It’s okay for a building like this to have a few holidays,” he explained, employing a euphemism for error I’d never heard before; I suppose it has to do with taking the occasional day off from the reigning standards of workmanship, a most human thing to want to do. “Holiday?!” Joe roared when I passed on the comment. “I’ve got some news for Charlie: This building’s a fuckin’ Mardi Gras!”

image WOOD, FINISHED

One last thing about trim: You don’t ordinarily find it in furniture, since it’s customary in furniture making to hallow rather than obscure the joinery. I mention this because as I worked at finishing my building’s surfaces that summer, I came to see that the whole notion of furniture had more to do with the design and finish of my writing house than I’d ever imagined. I realized that its lack of trim and transparency of structure had less to do with the aesthetic of the Bauhaus than that of the furniture maker, who characteristically strives to make the decorative and the structural one—not by suppressing the decorative, but by elaborating and refining, almost lovingly, his structures. The furniture maker strives to emphasize the beauty of his joints, to highlight the ingenious ways a piece fits together and conveys its weight to the ground, and to bring out the inherent qualities of its materials with his painstakingly handworked finishes.

This last labor consumed me for a great many of those Joeless days, as I sanded and oiled all the interior surfaces of my building, a task so vast it made me feel like a mouse trying single-handedly to refinish an armoire. The sanding alone took me over every inch of the interior four separate times: first with the belt sander, to remove the saw marks and lumberyard inks, and thrice more with the palm sander, each time applying a finer and finer grit, until the grain rose up brightly from the muffled surface of blemishes, sanding marks, and pith. Each coat of tung oil required another circumnavigation of the interior, and there were two coats everywhere but on the desk, which received a third and a fourth. Lastly there were the once-overs with steel wool, to remove the tack between coats of oil.

Once I’d acquired the proper frame of mind, or maybe I should say mindlessness, I found finishing to be an exquisite form of drudgery, especially after I’d laid all my power tools aside and taken up the oil cloth. Bringing nothing more than my hands to the task, I slowly rubbed and pressed the wood as if it were muscled flesh, over and over again in a widening spiral of attention. And after a few hours it did begin to feel like some weird interspecies form of massage. The backs of these boards, far from being inanimate, responded to my touch, absorbing the oils and then admitting the light deep into their grain until their complexion completely changed, the wood becoming more essentially and emphatically (and yet at the same time somehow less literally) itself.

Finishing acquainted me with these woods—the species but also the individual boards—in a way nothing we’d done to them until now ever had. Now I knew fir, how the rub of oil elicits its fine salmon hue, and how the small, tight knots in an ordinary two-by-four will fluster the calm sweep of its grain. White pine blushes faintly pink, swirling here and there with nuttier streaks of heartwood, and as the permanent wetting of the oil brought forward the sweeping grain and figuration of my ash, I could make out beneath the desk’s finish what looked like a half-dozen baseball bats flattened out in a kind of Mercator projection. There are boards in this building already as familiar to me as the skin on the back of my hand.

image HABITABLE FURNITURE

Two and half years ago, when I mentioned to Charlie that I conceived of my building as a piece of furniture, all I had in mind was a particular scale and a tightly ordered, ship-shape layout—certainly not an intricate wooden interior that I would end up sanding and oiling and rubbing every square inch of by hand. But as I went about this work, investing my hours and days in the cultivation of these wood surfaces, I felt like it was indeed a piece of furniture I was finishing and, more, that a piece of furniture was exactly what a “writing house”—a name my building seemed to have grown into—should be. Why this should be so I didn’t have a clue. Now I think I do.

Blame it on the tung oil fumes, but I began to wonder why it is that studies and libraries are so often finished in wood, in fine stocks and handcrafted panels oiled to resemble furniture. It only made sense that Charlie would have adopted this particular idiom for my writing house, since it is after all a study and a home for books. But where did the convention come from in the first place? I found the outlines of an answer in a couple of histories, and what I read suggested that there might be yet another path along which time finds its way into our buildings, working somewhere beneath the consciousness of architects and builders and inhabitants, but shaping our dreams of place all the same.

The study, it seems, evolved during the Renaissance from a piece of bedroom furniture: the writing desk, escritoire, or secretary, in which a man traditionally kept his ledgers and family documents, usually under lock and key. Personal privacy as we think of it scarcely existed prior to the Renaissance, which is when the wide-open house was first subdivided into specific rooms dedicated to specific purposes; before that time, the locked writing desk was as close to a private space as the house afforded the individual. But as the cultural and political currents of the Renaissance nourished the new humanist conception of self as a distinct individual, there emerged a new desire (at least on the part of those who could afford it) for a place one might go to cultivate this self—for a room of one’s own. The man acquired his study, and the woman her boudoir.

Probably the first genuinely private space in the West, the Renaissance study was a small locked compartment that adjoined the master bedroom, a place where no other soul set foot and where the man of the house withdrew to consult his books and papers, manage the household accounts, and write in his diary. Exactly when such rooms became commonplace is hard to date precisely, though under the OED’s entry for the word “study,” there is a citation from 1430 that would argue for the fifteenth century at the latest: “He passed from chambre to chambre tyle he come yn his secret study where no creature used to come but his self allone.”

In Renaissance Italy such a room was called a studiolo, which happens to be the same word used to denote a writing desk; at about the same time the French began to use the word cabinet to denote a kind of room as well as a locked wooden box. These spaces “grew from an item of furniture to something like furniture in which one lives,” I read in Philippe Ariès’s five-volume A History of Private Life. The new room was essentially the old piece of furniture writ large, an escritoire blown up to habitable dimensions. It was only natural that the new space would preserve the wooden finishes and intricate detailing of its precursor, so that the interiors of a study came to look a lot like the interior of a rolltop desk as seen by, say, a mouse.

I found it uncanny, and somehow almost moving, that this particular bit of history could have inscribed itself on my building without so much as a conscious thought from Charlie or me. But I suppose this is how it usually goes with our buildings: history will have its way with them, whether their architects and builders are historically minded or not. So it happens that every library or study that’s ever been finished in wood has as its ancestor the escritoire or studiolo, and that the scent of masculinity given off by rooms paneled in dark wood—men’s clubs, smoking parlors, speakeasies—has its source in the exclusively male preserve of the study. Here then was yet another sense in which our spaces are wedded ineluctably to our history, to times that, though we may have long ago forgotten them, our buildings nonetheless remember.

Perhaps the most famous and influential of all Renaissance studies was the one belonging to Michel de Montaigne. In 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, Montaigne retired from public life—he’d practiced law in Bordeaux, serving for a time as the city’s magistrate—to his country estate, where he began to spend the better part of his days in a circular library on the third floor of a tower. Here he read rather aimlessly, jotted down his thoughts now and again, and eventually invented a new literary genre that he decided, with characteristic modesty, to call an “attempt,” or essay.

Just what the architectural setting might have had to do with the literary achievement—the new space with the new voice—is impossible to say with certainty. But whenever Montaigne wrote about his study it was in terms that suggested there was a close connection in his mind between the place and the project, a project that has been likened to an exploration of the newly discovered continent of the self.

“When at home I slip off a little more often to my library,” he tells us in an essay, “On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse” (being alone with his books is his favorite), “which I like for being a little hard to reach and out of the way.” From his tower library, encircled by his books and “three splendid and unhampered views,”

it is easy for me to oversee my household…I am above my gateway and have a view of my garden, my chicken-run, my backyard and most parts of my house. There I can turn over the leaves of this book or that, a bit at a time without order or design. Sometimes my mind wanders off, at others I walk to or fro, noting down or dictating these whims of mine.

It’s not hard to find likenesses between the form of the essays and the room in which they took shape. The broad compass of its outlook, the desultory skipping from volume to volume that the bookshelves “curving round me” would have encouraged, the siting of the library such that it allowed Montaigne simultaneously to oversee and withdraw from domestic life—in a great many ways the material facts of Montaigne’s study aligned closely with the habits of a mind that ranged widely, that believed the best way to understand Man was by closely examining the circumference of one man’s experience (his own), and that relished the minutiae of everyday life. (One of my favorite passages in the essays concerns the pleasures of scratching, a topic I would not have expected literature’s first essayist to get around to.) The fact that from his desk Montaigne could see both his books and his household—and it was rare at that time for a study even to have a window—mirrors the characteristic movement of his essays, commuting so easily between the evidences of literature and of life. Montaigne’s tower also provided him a place from which he could see without being seen, allowing him to withdraw from the world and yet still experience a kind of power over it. “There,” he said of his study, “is my throne.”

“First we shape our buildings,” Winston Churchill famously remarked, “and thereafter our buildings shape us.” It may be this kind of reciprocal action that best explains the tie between the Renaissance invention of the study and the age’s discovery of the self, an achievement in which Montaigne must be counted a Columbus, and his study the Santa Maria on which he set sail. What began as a safe and private place for a man to keep his accounts and genealogies and most closely held secrets gradually evolved into a place one went to cultivate the self, particularly on the page. According to Philippe Ariès, the emergence of a modern sense of privacy and individualism during the Renaissance was closely tied to changes in the literary culture, to the ways that people read and the forms in which they wrote. The discovery of silent reading fostered a more solitary and personal relationship with the book. Then there was the new passion for the writing of diaries, memoirs, and, with Montaigne, personal essays—forms that flourished in the private air of the study, a room that is the very embodiment in wood of the first-person singular.

image LIGHT

While I was putting the finishing touches on my own first-person house, a local electrician by the name of Fred Hammond had been busy rigging up its electrical and telephone lines—the last significant hurdle before I could move in. It was one hurdle I decided it would be the better part of valor (Joe’s valor, that is: I’d never claimed wiring the building ourselves would be a “piece a cake”) to leave to a licensed professional. Given my extensive personal history of physical mishap (I’ve been bitten in the face by a seagull, and once broke my nose falling out of bed), remaining alive and intact for the duration of this project was never something I took for granted, and having avoided serious injury to this point—fingers and toes still coming in at ten and ten—I wasn’t about to start fooling around now with volts and amps and alternating current, an alien realm to which my customary haste and reliance on trial and error seemed especially ill-suited.

Fred and his partner Larry happen to be brilliant electricians, but even so my little writing house managed to tax their skill and patience. “This is not normal construction,” Fred declared each time he missed a deadline and tossed another cost-estimate out the window. What he meant was that there were no sheetrocked walls or dropped ceilings behind which he could easily run, and hide, his wires. For the same reason, Charlie and I had both resigned ourselves to exposed wires or conduit. But Fred ultimately came up with a much more elegant solution, though it proved to be difficult and time-consuming to execute. The solution involved Fred, the smaller of the two electricians, spending a great many hours stuffed into the eighteen-inch crawl space beneath my building, blindly snaking wires up from there through the closed-in fin walls and bitching lustily the whole time. I give him credit for a masterful wiring job, but if I ever summon the courage to follow Thoreau’s example and actually tote up what this house cost me to build, I expect Fred’s bill will help push the total into the zone of serious folly. (I’m guessing I spent somewhere in excess of $125 a square foot—for an uninsulated, unplumbed outbuilding, on which half of the construction labor was free.) Fred’s complaint—“not normal construction”—could serve very nicely as a legend inscribed over my building’s door.

The electricians finished up on a gray and chilly day in November, metallic as only that month can make them, and when Fred and Larry drove off I was elated to have the building to myself again, no more wire snakes, outlet boxes, or complaints to dance around. Now I had light and something that could pass for heat. Joe, whose hand had just about recovered, was due back in a few days to help me hook up the stove; to Charlie’s disappointment, I’d opted for kerosene instead of wood, going with a sophisticated little Japanese unit with a microchip that would see to it that the building was toasty by the time I arrived for work in the morning. For the time being, I had a couple of space heaters I could plug in, and so begin to get settled, sort of. All along I’d figured there’d come this one red-letter day when the building would be finished, but now I could see it wasn’t ever going to be as definitive or ceremonial as all that, no bottle of champagne smashed across the bow. The way things were going, there’d probably be maintenance jobs to start in on before the punch list was completely punched. So I decided I might as well just move in the day after the day Fred and Larry moved out.

I spent what little remained of that afternoon cleaning up inside, sweeping out snips of wire, nails, and sawdust. As I was finishing up, Judith and Isaac paid me a visit, giving me a chance to show off my new lights. Isaac, who’d been an infant when we poured the footings, was a boy now, two and a half years old and able to make the trek out here on his own power. He had brought along a toy tugboat and a copy of Pat the Bunny, and before he and Judith headed back to the house, he placed the boat and the book on an empty shelf and took Judith’s hand to go. I couldn’t tell if Isaac meant the items as a housewarming present or as a way to mark the new space as his own, give him a reason to return.

As darkness came on, I hauled a couple boxes of my books out from the barn and shelved them; book by book, the walls thickened and the room grew warmer. I got in a few trips before nightfall, and on the last, with two crates balanced under my chin, I stopped for a moment at the bottom of the hill to have a look at the writing house, lit up for the first time. It was not a terribly hospitable evening, moonless and blowing fitfully, the leaves recently flown from the trees, and my building seemed a welcome addition to the landscape—this warm-looking, wide-awake envelope of light set down in the middle of the darkening woods. It looked like some kind of a lantern, spilling a woody glow from all four sides. The building seemed to order the shadowy rocks and trees all around it, to wrest a bright space of habitation from the old, indifferent darkness.

I don’t want this to sound like some kind of vision, because though my building might have started out that way, a dreamy notion I’d once had, it was more literal than that now. Not just some metaphor or dream, the building I saw in front of me was a new and luminous fact. A new fact in this world, that was plain enough, but also a new fact in my life. That I had dreamt it and then had a hand in making it a fact was more gratifying than I can say, but now I was looking past that, or trying to, wondering, pointlessly perhaps, about how this building I’d helped to shape might come in time to shape me, where the two of us might be headed. Since the day Joe and I got it all closed in the building had reminded me of a wheelhouse, and now that it stood there all lit up on the wide night, a bright windshield gazing out from beneath its visor at some prospect up ahead, it certainly looked to be journeying somewhere.

But now I was dreaming.

I don’t think there is a lighted house in the woods anywhere in this world that doesn’t hint at a person inside and a story unfolding, and so, it seemed, did mine. As I walked with my crates up the hill toward my cabinet of light, the person that it hinted at was surely recognizable as me, or at least that part of me this room had been built to house. So this was the house for the self that stood a little apart and at an angle, the self that thought a good place to spend the day was between two walls of books in front of a big window overlooking life. The part of me that was willing to wager something worthwhile could come of being alone in the woods with one’s thoughts, in a place of one’s own, of one’s own making. As for the story that this house hinted at, the first part of it you know already, the part about its making; the next wouldn’t begin until tomorrow, on move-in day, a morning that from here held the bright promise of all beginnings, of departure, of once upon a time.