Shelburne, VT is a cute perfect little New England town with lots of picturesque historic buildings and farms and fantastic architecture dotted all over the landscape. My house is right in the village on a little loop drive that abuts the LaPlatte Nature Park. There’s about fifteen little houses on little lots in my little loop neighborhood. There’s a big field for wandering around in and the sledding hill and the community gardens all right here. One could walk to the grocery store or the PO or the hardware or one of a few decent restaurants via the woods, should one choose to do so. It’s not some vast wilderness, tho. It’s a little city wilderness. It’s owned by the Nature Conservancy. Pass two houses, go by the community garden, enter the woods and go down the steep trail, take a right at the bottom, go over the little bridge and walk a ways and you’ll get to LaPlatte Falls. It’s frozen, because it’s been sub-zero for weeks. I bought this stupid over-priced, shoddy-built, teeny-tiny, leaky cold wet house with no central heating in central Vermont because I can walk out the door and think: This is it. This is my town. These are my woods. These are my falls. This is my everything. I am here.

“If you had to leave your house at a moment’s notice— if, for example, your house was on fire— what would you take? Now, I’m going go out on a limb and assume you want all the living creatures in your house to survive and that you’re going to be taking them with you. But, what possessions do you value? What are the things in your life that are so important to you that you would spend the very spare moments that you have left to collect them?”

To be honest, I don’t think I’d remember to take much out of the house. I’d try to wear appropriate clothing and maybe grab my wallet; if I’m lucky I’d grab my laptop. It has my life’s work on it. Mostly.

There were the wandering years: the years when mind and body wandered, looking for a home. There were those years I wrote myself into existence. I wrote, “I write, therefore I exist.” I wrote myself into history. I have gathered, in my maternal grandfather’s old army trunk that sits by the front door, notes from the wandering years.

I do not feel as if I have sufficiently captured the breadth or depth of bound paper in this photograph. The earliest writings start in elementary school; they cease shortly after the birth of my daughter. There is a binder containing most of my slides. There is my laptop. The binders containing thousands of film negatives are not pictured: I keep them in the room where Iris was sleeping. Like a fire, I had a short amount of time to gather everything and photograph. I did not risk the back bedroom. Also not pictured are my passport and the aforementioned wallet. I like to think I’d have the wherewithal to grab them in case of fire. I think I would.