We were richly blessed in wood. In a strange homage, maybe, to the family farm, we kept all the wood that could be salvaged from the barn under the veranda of the city house. Imagine a whole barn collapsed like a cocktail umbrella and wedged impossibly into the space under a summer porch. The whole thing engineered so as to allow the maximum volume of wood to be salvaged, preserved, archived. It was impossible in the early years to de-wedge any of the wood. Cats could occasionally make their way into the dense pile, but we worried, of course, that they would never emerge.