Letters and Visits

# Chapter 1: The Desk

The flagstones are cold.

My feet know this before I do. They have already swung off the bed and landed, and the cold travels up through the soles and into my ankles and announces that it is not yet spring, regardless of what the air said last night. I stand anyway. Cob is still asleep. His breathing has that particular low rasp it gets when he is lying on his left side, which is the side he says he does not favor, though he favors it every night.

The cottage is dark. Grey-dark, not black-dark — the kind where I can see the doorframe and the edge of the table but not the chair, which I find with my shin.

That was the chair.

I make it to the south corner without further injury. The writing desk is where I left it, which is where Cob put it in autumn, which is where it has been since. He built it from a single elm board he had been saving. I asked him once what he had been saving it for, and he said, "Something the right size." The desk is wide across the top, three drawers down the right side, a narrow shelf above for ink. The elm grain runs lengthwise and catches the lamplight when there is lamplight. There is no lamplight yet.