Up: Weekend in Cambridge, Mass

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Another Bathtub, Another House

By Paul Ford

Somewhere - I couldn't tell you....

I was taken to a party in my green shirt. I sat in the garden and put my hand on a slug. The weather was excellent. I met people and they were comfortable and smiled at me and didn't seem to judge me more than was needed. A man with a beard, who owned the houses, had torn out the third and fourth floors, filled them in with curved white adobe, and some of the walls were open to the air - not open windows, but actually just not there. You could climb a tree trunk debarked and varnished, with antlers, brass handles, and branch-knobs as footholds. After climbing - which I did with trepidation, worried that my bulk would break something, but he built expecting all sizes - there was a loft, extended by an overhang, and at the edge of the loft, at the end of the overhang was a bed with clean white sheets and a pillow, and past the bed there was half a geodesic dome and on the floor two holes, big enough to fall through, a full 50 foot drop left there to give the sleepers air.

I remember falling asleep on a summer day at the hairpin turn where I went to college; there was a steep 50 or 60 feet to fall of the edge of it, and I was reading with the view, singing and talking and making noise, and fell asleep, woke up with a leg hanging over the side, ready to go the rest of the way. I would never have thought to make that my bedroom, but it was exciting to see.

A bathtub.

The same bathtub from the second floor, through a porthole in the floor. (See also Filling the Bathtub.)

The windows the top floors, seen from the ground.

Window onto Boston proper.

Light in the garden.

Funded by the kind and marvelous Kate Guay, of Thrown Askew.