We left Planthandlers with gum in our mouths. Outside, at the entrance to the greenhouse, a dog licked crumbs of fertilizer off the blade of a shovel.

When he is ready, Warren will return to his heart-shaped island. He says he can’t wait, but he is waiting.

A thing I haven’t told anyone is that this place is the place where I feel the way you would feel on a heart-shaped island, glad to open my eyes from dreams of the place I live where the boys next door are dim malevolent twins who ride their bicycles onto my lawn and say, when I go out to shoo them away, “We know you from somewhere.” “You know me from right here,” is what I tell them, and go back inside.

Tumble home. It’s a shipbuilding term I learned from Warren. It’s the place on a ship that is, if I understand him, the widest part of the bow before it narrows to cut through water—it is the point where the water parts and goes to one side of the ship or the other. To me, the tumble home is the place where nothing can touch you.

I have walked barefoot on floors so badly cleaned I had to brush off my feet before sliding them between the sheets at night. Floors cleaned not at all is what I mean, because the cleaning was left to me.

Here it’s not my job so the floors are clean. Our rooms, Chatty says, are the same as years before. There are no college pennants tacked up on the walls, no posters of rock stars, either. Just serviceable furniture—a maple chest and desk, a single bed refreshed by the linen service weekly, and hangers that cannot be removed from the closet, a hotel touch. At the end of each hall is a kitchenette with baskets of apples and oranges, and packets of hot chocolate mix.

We can personalize the rooms to the extent we care to. Chatty hung curtains of crocheted lace, but I like a room that doesn’t give a person away. Though I do display a collage I made. It is a photograph of a Great Dane looking at his leg where I strapped on a photo of a Timex to his wrist. The title of this piece is “Watchdog Watching.” We’re all artists here.

Would it make you uneasy to know that I have seen the inside of your house? Anyone who bought that magazine did. It surprised me. I would have guessed you lived in spare rooms done in stinging whites and grays. But there you were by a cozy fire in a house more lodge than stage. And in the studio where you paint: orderly racks of canvases, the wood-burning stove to heat the place. But is it a good idea to have an ax in the room where you work?

And a swimming pool in the backyard. I never had a swimming pool; I swam in a willow-ringed pond. My favorite thing was staying in the longest when a thunderstorm struck (She is the smallest child who swings the highest my mother once wrote in a letter to my father). What can I say about myself today? That I am the last to close a window when it rains.