But the other small room, which is only slightly larger than the bathroom, received the most thought if not the most time, and is certainly the most intimate. It was once a second bedroom. Now it contains a desk, a swivel rocker and some of my own sketches on the wall, which are not good, but mine. The desk is very old, pine, and it is the only thing on which I spent much money. It has huge drawers, and in two of them I keep a careful record of my getting-and-spending, as my grandmother used to call it. In the others are my journals, the books I have kept of my travels through this place. I write here, fill in sketches. It is where I come least frequently, but with the most thoughtfulness.

After Katie leaves, after the wood is cut and the cake baked, I sit in this room. Bewildered by her and by my own reactions, I come here to write about it, to try to clear it up in that methodical way. But I can’t. It is a jumble in my mind. I wonder for the first time since coming here how I look, how I appeared to her, and it bothers me that I seem to care.

I know for certain that my hands have aged. I see them every day, and I see their thinness, their callouses. The veins stand out in them, and the skin is remarkably transparent; it is a shock to first realize how thin the covering of skin actually is. I have moved that tiny protective layer back and forth and seen through it clearly to the veins and arteries that do not move beneath, and realized how little there is to protect them, how very frail and vulnerable I am, just being human.

I know that my body is trim; when I look down at my belly and legs I can see that they are tight and muscular, without extra flesh, even in the winter when I had thought I might become plump. That is the time when my body pales, but in the summer it becomes a deep brown and tough, not as fragile-looking as the winter translucence of it.

I do not know about my face. I began to cut my own hair soon after I came here; the first time chopping it off short, almost in anger against the long darkness of it that I kept in coils, or braided, around my head, or pulled back and falling loosely down. I remember now that people used to tell me it looked gracefully old-fashioned, but I cut it all away. Now when I run the scissors through it, I see much gray in what I cut, and I assume that that is now the predominant colour, although I am not so old. Only forty-three or four, I think, if it has really been nine years.