I knew it was a strange place, when the water tasted like the air smelled. The heat is thick in its stench, hitting me in the face when I walked out the door. It’s one thing to visit a place and not want to live there but quite another living and working there because it’s somewhere else. These thoughts bounced from synapse to synapse, as I lay half-nude in my one bedroom apartment. The mid-July humidity banging down my door, after chasing me up the stairs only to find it had seeped through the screens of my windows.
This place to hand my hat without a coat rack in sight and the shirt torn off my back. I lay awake many nights and think about the cottage. There I would look out over the water as flat as glass. Then, I take notice of the moon, for which I am grateful, without which I could not see the deer walk across the pebbled New England beach without a care in the world or fear of being sought out or followed.
I would sit for hours if the no-see-ums would just let me be. Another reason to light up a secret cigarette, some may claim. Even when the tide has gone out and the mucky sands are exposed, the smell of the air off the salt pond is fresh as if it were protected by the surrounding trees. I’ve often despised the smell of accompanied by a sycamore tree and at the cottage there are none. Perhaps this is just another comparative ideal for me to separate this from that, here from there, foreign to familiar. Comfort and peace of mind are found in our own ways. And for many who find themselves somewhere other than that ideal attempt to create a space, “a room of one’s one.”
