I lived in East Hampton, New York, for two consecutive winters once upon a time. In the summers, I would go to a place called Minisink Hills, in Pennsylvania, and live in a cabin there (of clay and wattles not made). This was in the time between living in NYC and moving to Los Angeles. This place, this cabin, was an old blacksmith's shop in the woods, it wasn't winterized, you could see the outside from the inside, both through the abundant casement windows, things of sheer beauty, and through the walls themselves that were made of wood that did not always fit perfectly together. When you saw the outside through the wood walls themselves and not through the windows, it was starry. I have long called this place my soul's home, that was the place I lived in that I loved most of all the many places I have lived. (You have to really say the second clause of that sentence slowly for it to make sense.) (The place I loved second best was a 1920s cottage in Echo Park, in Los Angeles, and I loved that place second best because it mimicked a cabin in the woods whilst being situated high on a hill in the city I love, this was in the time before developers, with their bottomless greed, came in and sacked the old Los Angeles and also in the time when it still rained.) When I went to bed at night, when I lived in the old blacksmith's shop in the woods in eastern Pennsylvania, I would have to throw my covers all the way back to check for spiders, I did not want to sleep with them, even though I knew that I slept next to them. Even bats got in sometimes! I would lie in bed at night and listen to the life of the nighttime woods, I could hear the animals talking to each other, and I could hear how the trees spoke too. There are not words to describe the language of trees, I cannot even describe how it is I knew I could hear it. I cannot hear it anymore, I do not have the great good fortune to live in the woods. Now I live in a concrete box, but back then, I did not. Sometimes the full moon would call me out to the woods at night, and I would answer her. That was also where I saw art history in the skies, mainly Fragonard; and that was where I watched, in the woods around me, the pageantry of what I read, namely, Graves and Herodotus. I was a young woman heavy with the everythingness of life and death, I was pregnant with the world in which the living and the dead commingle, and that world was pregnant with me. It was an eroticism that extended far beyond my body. When I lived in East Hampton in the wintertime, I would oftentimes go to bed wearing my clothes so that when I woke up in the morning, I could reach my writing faster, I would not have to take the time to dress! I no longer sleep in my clothes for time-saving reasons, there is time enough to get to my work in the morning. However, I do often find myself at 3:30 a.m. pulling back my covers to reach it sooner than, say, far-off six o'clock. Now I am a different creature than I was then, when I was young, but I am no less in love with what I do.