Years ago, in the few years after we moved in, I had the thought of that area in the front of the attic, with the windows and the west-northwest-facing view and the deep and current landscape, as eventually a practical, purposive, functional office – a place to store books and papers and to do work, like an office at an institution, a college or press or lab or wherever – though still different, informal and at home. That’s when I put in the bookshelves, and placed the file cabinet and music equipment and all the boxes of books there, and when we floated the idea of a circular staircase connecting it to the existing office below, etc.
Then, at the beginning of the pandemic – though it may have started a few years before, I may have set the computer up for something and started noticing the more personal aspects already there in the space, canning stuff etc – during which time also I was working on the legacy trees stuff, and getting more deeply immersed in the history and structure of my immediate manual and social environments – at the beginning of the pandemic, when we lived inside more and hoarded food and needed to store and to better arrange things in our home – first in the basement for food and household goods and decontamination, then upstairs in attic for kitchen stuff etc (the glass jar shelving had gone up previous summer) – and Carlene moved into the office, and my former office (where I had done a lot over the years, both creative work and house business and family affairs) had to get moved somewhere, up to the attic, first requiring practical storage space (the first and second of the new shelving projects) and then emphasizing the existing office configuration and opportunities, and then the full blown imagination of an actual working office with the feel (and this was in the wake of of the deer park house burning up) of Fred’s library merged with Tom’s office and rooted in this spot, in my house –
And at the center, the Oak, and behind it the Laurel and the Tulip and the Rose
A place where it could be anything, where an individual could become somebody – and the kinds of anything or somebodies it could be, could be anything
And now, where the silverfish and dust-motes are caught on the rat cam
And the west-northwest-facing house still stands
Steven Pavlos Holmes, Ph.D. 