This is how I want to buried: seated at my desk, pencil poised over a lined, spiral bound notebook, entombed in a room painted in Portrait Tone, rimmed with antique white, open-backed bookshelves with a closet, door removed, that was transformed into bright-cherry stained custom shelves, writing classic, lyrical essays on the natural environment. “Oh, for a book in a cozy nook and oh, for a quiet hour.”

Buried in books. Books stacked on the floor, next to the bentwood Amish rocker, on top of the ink jet printer and trash can. Small niches, gaps between the tombs and the shelves above them, to hold memorabilia that expresses my quirks, a nuanced personality charmed by steampunk—a wood, yellow bird, aged by sandpaper and paint, holding dangling rhinestone jewelry—by three, fairy-sized Scandinavian gnomes with wild dark hair and engorged noses and mischievous expressions, by finials, by family lineage pictures arranged, grouped together, by black and white or color, photo collages of my mother, my father, my child self with sisters, held together by round metal rings, and pithy quotations. “May all your weeds be wild flowers.”

And on the lone bare wall, a watercolor, a copse of white birch enflamed in gold leaves, hangs next to the desk placed underneath a glass paned view overlooking a landscape—gardens that were planted for wildlife and edged by a native, US, eastern forest.

It will be a testament to a life dedicated to reading a myriad of topics: poetry, gardening, folklore, mythology, landscape design, native plants, nature writing, creativity, leadership, how to, art journaling, and classic words, essays and anthologies written and compiled by those whose talent I yearned to absorb, synthesize, and spill onto paper.

It will be a shrine, an alter dedicated to my personal cannon of literature, hardcover and paper bound books that stitched my past and the caught present moment, the instant I moved out of physical self and into the omniscient eye, the time noted, frozen at 9:33, on a windup, ancient timepiece, passed from my mother to me, my father’s gift to her, the mantle clock that strikes on every quarter hour and counts down the chimed hour. And placed in front of it, a small sign reminder, “If it weren’t for the last minute, nothing would get done.”

The shelves will contain books penned in a near and distant past but categorized, labeled waiting for an inevitable future, that elusive promised realm of “I’ll read that later, when I have more time, when it’s raining days on end, when Doug goes out of town on business, when the next Buffalo blizzard comes as an October Surprise.” Those books shall become the channeled classics, the portal into a writer’s haven, where the men and women I sit and write with will be seated, bent over desks near mine, writing as if life expected it.

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