A Place of My Own Read Online Free PDF Page A

the middle—Charlie doesn’t look the part. But though the tail of his shirt may be on the loose, marching across his breast pocket you will invariably find a serried rank of pens and markers, their arrangement as fixed as the stars. I once asked him how his little system worked. “System?” he stammered. “You’ve got the wrong architect!” Yet after the gentlest prod he spelled it out in detail: “So, okay, the felt-tip here in first position? That’s a Stylist, for taking notes during meetings. Next up’s the black Expresso Bold, for rough schematic drawings, your basic big picture stuff, followed by the colored marker—usually red, but sometimes green—which I use to indicate clients’ changes on working drawings. And last but not least, the classic black Uniball fine-point, which is reserved exclusively for drafting.” Inside a very human exterior lurks the soul of an architect struggling to get out.
    It eventually became clear that, on this particular morning, the architect was in fact out and about. Charlie seemed pleased with the new room and its windows, but I could tell that something in this picture was bugging him. When I asked him what it was, he tried to demur, but his eyebrows had started to dance. One of the errors in Charlie’s self-conception is that he’s extremely good at hiding his feelings.
    I pressed, and he pointed out the window at the view.
    Looking out the bedroom window, you could follow the informal axis along which our garden had developed, as we gradually extended a slender finger of civilization from the back door out into what Judith had taken to calling the Wilderness: the irrepressible second-growth forest and scrub that was steadily marching down the hillside, threatening to engulf what was left of the farm and the little house. At ground level, from the old first-floor windows, this narrow corridor of grass with its adjoining beds of flowers, its rose arbor and fieldstone walls, had seemed a genuine accomplishment. But from here our hard-won path out into the land seemed more tenuous and paltry than I’d remembered it, and I guessed this was what was troubling Charlie about the view. The axis was all but lost in the big, turbulent landscape framed by the new window, expiring abruptly just past the arbor, which now seemed a few short steps from the back door. A nice pie of meadow was now visible in the distance, part way up the hillside, but the path held out no hope of ever reaching it. Suddenly it looked pointless. The elevated view Charlie had created had diminished the scope of the garden, and with it the reassuring marks of our presence in this landscape. We were back where we’d started more than a decade ago, the little house cowering behind its moat of lawn, struggling to fend off the advancing forest.
    What the garden’s axis needed now, the architect had concluded, was a destination—some sort of distinct object in the distance that would draw your eye out into the land and up the hill, somehow tie the cultivated foreground into the larger landscape above. I could sort of see his point, but it seemed to me this particular problem belonged down near the very bottom of a to-do list that had grown dauntingly tall. Judith and I were still camped out at my parents’.
    “So you mean like a bench or something?”
    “That would help. Absolutely. But I’ve got a neater idea.” He looked at me and grinned slightly, trying to gauge my appetite for neat new ideas, the last set not having yet been completely digested or paid for. “What I think we need to do is build something out there,” he began, extending an index finger through the rough opening and wagging it in the general direction of the meadow. “I haven’t figured out exactly what yet, but I think—in fact I know— that a little structure somewhere out there could really, really work. You need to think about it.”
    Just then I doubt there was anything I wanted to think about less. The prospect of