There is a particular hour, in a Yorkshire January, when the light gives up entirely on dignity and becomes pure, brazen gold across the dales. I had forgotten about it.

We had not meant to stay. We had come for a week, to settle the affairs of an aunt I had not seen often enough and to decide what to do with the house she had left, against all expectation, to me.

What the House Remembered

I had been a child in this house, intermittently, for the long summer holidays of the late 1960s. I had not expected the floorboards to remember me. And yet they did — each one of them, with its particular complaint underfoot, as familiar as a sentence I had once written and forgotten I knew.

“A house, if you let it, will write the next chapter for you.”

A New Book, Perhaps

There is a notebook open on the kitchen table now. There are five pages in it. I will not say what they are about — it is bad luck, and worse manners, to speak of a book before it has decided what it wishes to be. But I will say this: I am writing again, and I am happy, and the roof, for the moment, is holding.