.

 

Another Bathtub, Another House

Somewhere - I couldn't tell you....

I was taken to a party in my green shirt. I sat in the garden and put my hand on a slug. The weather was excellent. I met people and they were comfortable and smiled at me and didn't seem to judge me more than was needed. A man with a beard, who owned the houses, had torn out the third and fourth floors, filled them in with curved white adobe, and some of the walls were open to the air - not open windows, but actually just not there. You could climb a tree trunk debarked and varnished, with antlers, brass handles, and branch-knobs as footholds. After climbing - which I did with trepidation, worried that my bulk would break something, but he built expecting all sizes - there was a loft, extended by an overhang, and at the edge of the loft, at the end of the overhang was a bed with clean white sheets and a pillow, and past the bed there was half a geodesic dome and on the floor two holes, big enough to fall through, a full 50 foot drop left there to give the sleepers air.

I remember falling asleep on a summer day at the hairpin turn where I went to college; there was a steep 50 or 60 feet to fall of the edge of it, and I was reading with the view, singing and talking and making noise, and fell asleep, woke up with a leg hanging over the side, ready to go the rest of the way. I would never have thought to make that my bedroom, but it was exciting to see.

A bathtub.

The same bathtub from the second floor, through a porthole in the floor. (See also Filling the Bathtub.)

The windows the top floors, seen from the ground.

Window onto Boston proper.

Light in the garden.

.  .  .  .  .  

Funded by the kind and marvelous Kate Guay, of Thrown Askew.


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About the author: I've been running this website from 1997. For a living I write stories and essays, program computers, edit things, and help people launch online publications. (LinkedIn). I wrote a novel. I was an editor at Harper's Magazine for five years; then I was a Contributing Editor; now I am a free agent. I was also on NPR's All Things Considered for a while. I still write for The Morning News, and some other places.

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