The Write House

My novel is proceeding at my steady five-page-a-day clip. My fictional band of apocalyse survivors have escaped into the Connecticut countryside.

I’m a writer, sure, but before that, I’m a person, and a person’s got to indulge her proclivities from time to time, whether sharing restorative conversation with friends, slow slogging with a Westie, rallying against the assholes at our nation’s helm, or online looking at country houses in case of social collapse.

Yesterday I treated myself and punished Sam with an in-person tour of a country place circa 1820 with two barns set on 14 acres. A local artist had lived and worked there for 45 years. The Zillow pictures made it look charmingly higgledy-piggledy, heaped with books, stacked fishing rods, and assorted natural artifacts like rocks and animal skulls. The furniture was romantically threadbare, the floors wide-planked, the rooms dappled by sunlight.

We drove the hour and a quarter up and were greeted by our agent and an elderly man in a wheelchair wrapped in a blanket. “That’s the owner,” our agent whispered. “He has a mobility issue, which is why the house no longer works for him.”

It was a lovely day, mild and fall-smelling, and I didn’t feel bad about displacing the owner temporarily, because trust me, he was better off outside. The interior of the house was thick with both cigarette and pipe smoke. The romantic living room had a hospital bed in it. I could touch the six-and-a-half foot plaster ceilings with the flat of my hand. My feet were too big for ladder-pitched stair treads, and rooms that looked normal-size would have been hard-pressed to accomodate a toddler. Even the barn was a spatial and aesthetic disappointment, with an interior wall spliting it into clunky halves so any possible soaring was thwarted.

It was the opposite of anything we’d ever in a million years want to own but I’m in the middle of writing a dystopian novel. A ramshackle house by the side of the road that looked like it’s abandoned with an old barn on a remote country lane…my head has wasted no time moving in, and I’m not planning to change a thing.