27 Sept 10, Boise, Idaho
Just in time before the cool days of Fall, we've moved into a new house, a rental that we might have the option to buy. And after six turbulent months – involving three moves, and four different jobs for me – the place feels like a true destination for us, a homecoming. On the edge of the North End, where the hills begin to rise out of the canopy of trees above Eighth Street, our mid-century brick home is perched on a terrace that looks through sycamore and silver maple and crab apple trees into a wide western sky deepened with slot views through the roofs and trees across the street. We can see the high, grass-tan ridge of Camel's Back park glowing in the afternoon sun to our northwest, close enough it seems you could throw one of our crab apples and hit it. Our front yard is terraced above the sloping street with rip-rapped walls of basalt from the desert plain. A swing for Ada hangs from the bulking limbs of a sprawling sycamore right outside the living room window. The house has wood floors and a fireplace and its airy floor plan is at all times of the day dappled with light and adrift with the sounds of birds and lawn mowers and the occasional barking dog in the neighborhood. It's quite a gardened, day-dreamy little place. One of my favorite features is how my study (also known now as the guest room), like my study in SF, faces out with a view of the terrain and western sky ahead. There's a feeling of being a bird aloft in the trees, able to study the animal and human creatures below, to see what's coming from the weather, the scheming clouds. Able to daydream a little, or write, or ponder what needs or doesn't need pondering.
And it's a damn fine and fun yard for Ada to play in. The big canopies of limbs stretching above and the glimpses of limitless sky through their leaves. And of course the swing: she loves that thing like a pet pony and every morning now she points from the breakfast table window out at the dangling contrivance with an urgency that leads to tears if we don't go out. Once we do, and she's swinging away, she sings and hums and trills to herself as she takes in the world around her, the skittering squirrels and the scouting cats and the crab apples making a fruit salad of the yard. Anna loves the place too. Soon we'll have her studio set up in the garage, and the handsome house is suited to our mid-century-Americana-contemporary leanings in furniture and décor. But it's more than that. There is a serenity here, a garden calm at the edge of the hills, a good fung shui to the house's orientation and character, and Anna finally has a place that feels home to her, where she can decorate and create and flourish. We feel deeply good here, as rooted as the big tree in the yard, and I'm grateful for that. Though sometimes I come home from a night shift, walking up the rise into the opening stars to our sleeping home and wonder how I got so lucky, and thank whoever or whatever loaded the cards in our favor. Though I have a suspicion it was Anna who did that, as believing in and deserving of that kind of spiritual fortune stuff as she is.
