The desire either comes from the childhood memory of a cabin in the woods or the fact that my favorite writers remove themselves to such places to practice their craft. Perhaps it’s both. Either way, I’ve always wanted a private place, a cabin or studio, in which to write.

I’ve often dreamed of sitting in front of a typewriter with a view overlooking a lake or stream and writing my first book. The dream has changed over the years as I now envision the writing taking place on my trusty laptop. In its original form, however, the typing happened on an old Remington typewriter.

I still refer to the process as typing because I took a typing class in high school, not a keyboarding class, but I also remember my first computer, a Commodore VIC-20 (circa 1980), and the transition from typewriter to computer.

I guess those facts officially make me old as they mean that I was there when the age of the home computer became a reality. For the record, I did at least learn to type on an electric typewriter. These were not the horse-and-buggy days.

My initial experience with a word processing program came in college and I’ve used a computer for writing since first using Norton Textra Writer many moons ago as an English major at Mississippi State.

These days I’ve graduated to a MacBook and Microsoft Word and, aside from an occasional handwritten journal entry or thank you note, I prefer to write on my laptop. One look at my handwriting and it’s easy to understand why.

Now, let’s get back to that cabin in the woods. I’m currently reading “The Wild Marsh” by Rick Bass. In the intro, Bass writes of the cabin that serves as his writing studio, which sits adjacent to a wild marsh near his home in the Yaak Valley of Montana.

I thought about Bass and his writing space Sunday morning as G and I, accompanied by all four dogs and our cat, roamed about in the woods below our house near the back of the lake looking at a potential spot for a cabin in the woods.

The idea came about as part of a “downsizing after retirement” conversation and was actually G’s idea. To be clear, I’m not about to retire anytime soon, although I am getting close enough to at least start to dream about it.

Our cabin in the woods would be small. The idea being that less space equals less cleaning, less upkeep and more time to spend with each other, our kids (maybe even grandkids at some point), and our critters — as well as more time to travel, fly-fish, hunt, read and write.

A small footprint would displace as few trees as possible, and more woods and less cabin would equate to being more tucked away from the world (I’ve written before about our shared desire to become hermits).

Having a cabin would also free up our current house for family use when they visit the farm. As we walked around in the understory, geese honking on the hill above us while trying to figure out what we were doing down below in the trees, I began to envision the space.

In my mind, I could see myself next to a wood-burning fireplace as I sat writing at the small desk in our writing nook. The desk faced a window and looked out over a small porch and the back of the lake.

The porch had a couple of rocking chairs perfect for enjoying a sunrise coffee or a sunset bourbon surrounded by the sounds of the wood ducks greeting the morning or sounding last call for the evening.

I’ve thought about these images a great deal the past few days which inspired me to re-read one of my favorite Larry Brown stories. “Shack” is the last essay in Brown’s book “Billy Ray’s Farm,” and it encapsulates so many of the emotions that I’ve experienced this week.

Brown writes that “for a long time it lies buried in the brain like a seed: a vague idea of a little place somewhere off to itself, four walls to get inside, a roof to keep you from the rain, but where you can sit and watch it come down.”

Later, he adds that “finding the spot was what clinched it for me. Seeing where the house could sit made me start putting it there.”

I felt the same this week as G and I walked in the leaves and talked about our ideas for the cabin.

Brown envisioned himself there and then built it with his own hands. “One day, maybe I will eventually sit in it and either write something on a piece of paper or play a few chords on a guitar,” he writes. Sadly, he never got to write in the “Shack” as he was taken far too early at the age of 53 by a heart attack.

That reality was a bit of a wake-up call for me. “Keep dreaming and get to writing” was what I heard. Since moving to the farm in 2020, I’ve written in almost every room of our house, on the screened porch and in numerous spots outside.

I plan to keep writing in each of those places, Lord willing, until our dream of a little cabin in the woods becomes a reality. Until next time, here’s to the outdoor spaces that inspire us to create and to dream, and here’s to seeing you out there in our great outdoors.