I have lived in this house three times as long as I've lived anywhere, but it is still not the place I think of as home. When I am "home" in those few of my dreams that are representational, I am at the house of my high school years. My family worked hard to get me that attached to the place, and the fates that separated us from it seemed then the cruelest there could be.

I could speak for pages about climbing the hill to that house when no vehicle could brave its driveway, in silence but for my footsteps crunching through the layer of moonlight on the snow. About how the acres of trees would seem to summon storms when the weather needed to break. About the wild vine at the edge of the ravine on which I would tarzan as a youth, until the day I got too heavy and was tumbled down the hill. Suffice it to say - that house will always be my idyll.

I still know people who know people; word of that place reached me tonight, all unlooked for. It is, from all accounts, in the hands of good people; the current owners are among those who can appreciate the place's isolation, its supportiveness of idiosyncrasy.

The woodland house my family built now hosts one of the county's few genuine oriental gardens, not many paces from the place my family's favorite dog is buried. My high-school bedroom is now the home office that sustains the income of the place.

It pleases me to know the place is cared for, enough that I can overlook the fact that the business is "web-based photography". At least I can resist overanalyzing what that phrase might mean, in the bedroom I think of as mine, in the house I think of as home.