Location, Location, Location

 When I was a kid, I had a big backyard. Maybe not the biggest, but there was room for a football game plus a basketball court, sandbox, playset, and a little stream that would freeze in the winter so you could go ice skating. Behind the yard, and going on forever as far as I could tell, there were thick woods filled with trails and secret treehouses. For a kid growing up just outside of Detroit, it was heaven.

For a young writer (and voracious reader) it was more than that: it offered a never-ending choice of perfect spots to hide with a good book, a notebook, and a pencil until mom's voice found its way through the branches to beckon me home with the promise of lunch or dinner or bedtime. I remember one spot in particular that I loved, and to this day I still believe I did my best writing there.

Thinking back on it now, I'm sure the tree was no more than fifteen feet high, but in my memory it's at least a hundred, and I would climb up to the very top with my writing tools and brilliant ideas. There were a couple of thick branches that bent perfectly around each other to create a seat, complete with places to tuck my feet to make sure I didn't fall while I wrote. 

I don't know how often I really sat up there to write, or for how long, or even what stories I wrote up there. It's possible my recollection is colored by the warm sepia-toned filter of nostalgia; I think I stayed up there all day most days, and I think I wrote the greatest short stories and poetry the world had ever seen.

If any of that is true, I'm giving all credit to the greatest writing spot in the world. 

Since I started writing again, I hadn't given much thought to where I was writing. We have an office in our home that didn't get much use until the pandemic made me a virtual teacher, playing drama games with faces on a screen in an empty room. I slowly started to claim the desk there as a writing space, and suddenly it started to look like this:

No branches, no view, nowhere to tuck my feet. 

I didn't think much of it, and I got some good writing done in that mess. A few months later, we took the family on a summer road trip, and I found new writing spots:

Right now I'm sitting on a screened-in deck overlooking a thick forest on a hill that slopes down to what we call "the creek" here on the coast of Maine - really it's a narrow tributary of the Kennebec River just before it joins the Atlantic Ocean.

 

I've got a chair, and I don't need to hook my feet around anything to keep my balance, but the view is everything I remember. It's a spot that makes it easy to feel like a kid again, inspired to write the greatest stories in the world. 

In fact, I should get back to that now.