Sometimes you need a place of escape. Private. Away. Yours.
Across the drive, a bit to the north of the front door of my house in Carmel Valley, I've been fortunate enough to have such a place from which to work when in California, for all these years. Six hundred square feet. Never really refined, rough in fact by any reasonable measure… but a place of refuge.
Stickley furniture moved from New York. A lithograph of a spectacular golf hole in Ireland, where (among numerous others) I pulled one into the ocean, next to a set of placques commemorating patents I may or may not have principally authored.
A fireplace offering smokey echoes of past comforts.
A Sirius radio purchased in the first years of satellite broadcasts, which will go on offering the Sinatra channel and Classic Vinyl and Real Jazz (my favorites, for what it's worth) free of charge for the duration of its days.
Overflow wine racks from next door. A few family pictures. A lot of memories.
And a window. Looking uphill. Where in years past cattle, from a ranch then operational, would wander by on occasion. Pretty regularly, in fact. That ranch has now been sold off, but the land is still pretty open… not wild, but not far from it. Visitors no longer include any large four legged creatures, at least not that I've seen lately. But from time to time, nature shows up, here in the form of a few wild turkeys caught in the rectangular aperture that is view from a room.