The first is a view from the door. The second, a view as I’m standing at the window you see in the first.

Everything in the middle is vast and empty, waiting for me to make decisions and create … a table, chairs, a floor mat for doing morning exercises, even.

This is my space. No (wonderful, sweet, clutter-loving) husband. No dog unless she’s invited. I’ll take photographs of food here (the light!). I’ll write letters to friends (the bottom row of that first shelf is full of paper, pens, envelopes). I’ll make schedules and plans, fill notebooks with ideas and then do those ideas.

It’ll come inch by inch. We bought a house twice as big as the (quite tiny) apartment we’d been living in. Our things take up a very little space, and we won’t be using our money to buy up more more more things. So a table-building project here, an estate-sale chair there.

This is a room big enough to fit the next twenty years. Maybe thirty. Why rush to fill it?