I even have a bit of garden.

Last night, amidst tornado sirens and torrential rain, I ate Chinese food on the hardwood floor in the middle of my living room. With my hands. The rain was hurricane rain- sudden and windblown and tree-shaking one moment, broken and cloudless the next. I channeled my inner twelve-year-old and drank out of the kitchen faucet. The previous tenent left half a roll of toilet paper, though there is no shower curtain and I have no towel.

I slept on the floor last night, in my sleeping bag (though I'm missing my pad, somehow). I used two folded up pairs of jeans for a pillow. Even with the exhaustion from only two hours of sleep the night before, it was still one of the worst night's sleep I've ever had. When I got up my bones felt bruised and my muscles ached, as though this Victorian floor were having its revenge on my loose morals (I wore only a t-shirt to bed, revealing quite a bit of leg).

Awake, with clouded light coming in through all the high windows, I could not be happier. I'm as thirsty as a field hand and my tailbone is sore from sitting on the floor, but I'm in my own private utopia. This large, empty room feels like a yoga classroom or a ballet studio. It is pregnant with possibility. Shelves want plants; floors want bookshelves, rugs, chairs; walls want photographs. I feel like I'm in an empty fishbowl, ready to pick out colored gravel and plastic plants. My porch will be my temple- it's deep enough to hold a large table comfortably, and a hammock or a deep reading chair as well. Screened in and perfect. Someone left a dragonfly paper lamp globe over the bedroom light. I had two pieces of mail here when I arrived.

Last night, my fortune cookie said "You emerge victorious from the maze you've been traveling in."

Mine.