Dream House

Dream House

This is a little gray house with tiny rooms and a sagging roof nestled into a hillside that looks out to the headlands and the cold blue sea beyond. I am an Irish girl wearing a ruby petticoat under a brown tweed skirt, sturdy almost galumphy boots, and a warm moss-green sweater with worn elbows. This is my house, and the rooms have ceilings so low you have to stoop in the doorways. There is a sooted little fireplace in the sitting room with two wing chairs in front of it and golden reading lamps bent over the backs of each chair.

At night, when the wind off the sea howls round the corners of the little gray house with the sagging roof, I sit in one of the chairs and read old books that are fragrant with paste and lavender or scratch out lines of words with a jagged fountain pen in yellowed journals. Sometimes a friend takes his or her place beside me in the other chair, and we talk and listen to the sea wind and let the fire blaze and then die, waiting for the shadows to creep back into their corners, waiting for the first whisper of pale light to fall around our shoulders, waiting to begin again.