I’ve been thinking about the little house Martha and I rented when we first met and began co-habiting. We rented it from Stuart, an acquaintance who was off to Central America for a couple months, and it has been “Stuart’s House” in our folklore, ever since.  It was a rather sad little house a few miles from town, tired and neglected. Outside were the neighbor’s goats, a soybean field, a river on one side, and if one caught the light just right a glimpse of Mt. Hood. It was dank and gray as only a Willamette Valley house in winter can be, but we loved it, and painted it, and charmed it into the coziest possible place, keeping warm by the wood-stove, and, not surprisingly, or uniquely, each other.  When we moved in it was the break between fall and spring semesters, we had all of January off, and we isolated ourselves, though Martha waitressed. I worked on my senior thesis and read Plato and “Middlemarch,” and other dusty volumes. It was an idyllic, fleeting time of ease in our lives. Then spring semester and Stuart's return. We had other houses before leaving Oregon for Missouri, but none with the warmth and romance of our little house by the river.