Of windows and doorways

For as long as I can remember, the place from which I write has had to look out into the world. There must be light and the outdoors must be near at hand, close enough that I can walk into it for a re-charge of energy or for a grounding if I need one.
It was the view out one particular window that closed the deal on a house I bought in Wimberley when my son and I moved there. It was the window from which I saw the world as I wrote, a juniper-fragranced world that put into form many of the short stories I've written. Those stories are set here, the place I would live next, but I wrote them there. Later, I built a windowed weather-tight barn that was half writing studio, half tack and tool room. On days and nights that I wrote at my plank desk in this building detached from our house, I found great comfort in the sound of the shod footfall of our horses on the limestone rock just under the thin topsoil cover.
At my parents' summer home on the coast, I wrote in proximity of the sound, smell, and sight of the Gulf of Mexico which just beyond the yellow tablet and table before me met the horizon in billowing white clouds.
Writing by hand by an open window here at the ranch this evening, I am reminded of simpler times when this was not my home and I was a visitor for an occasional weekend out of the month. The room that is now my dining room was once a screened porch subject to the vagaries of weather and insects drawn to the light. I could write at night only as long as I could endure the unnerving, whirring dive bombs of insects against the screen.
The screened porch became a many-windowed room, and a metal-roofed porch we added keeps the weather at bay and runs interference between the bugs and me. Tonight, a nippy night that nonetheless portends spring, the windows suck rich wafts of honeyed huisache blossoms into the house. Other than my office, this is where I most often write, at this sturdy oak table in a room filled with arrowheads, hats, and books and photographs that are the narrative of my life as daughter and mother.
I've been busier lately than I like to be and have not spent much time in the barn, knowing better than to start a project I won't be able to finish. I was out there this morning helping my son and his friend Forrest find the tools they would need to work in the brush all day. A quick survey told me things were getting away from me a bit, and that I would need to set aside a couple of work days to clean tools and put them away.
There was something about having my son head out to finish a project in the pastures this morning, and there was something about the way the tool room looked in the second before I closed the door on it -- a familiar and ample room filled with the herramienta my father and I have amassed over almost 20 years. Something that made me remember the essence of days my father and I have worked this place together.
It wasn't at all long ago that we did, but concerns for my mother's health and his own have kept my father home in Laredo.
Over the years we grew close in exchanges and conversations as we made repairs to gates and water troughs. There's a way the quiet out here distills sentiment and renders emotion precise and uncluttered, and having said that, I understand some of the best days of my adult life have been spent in the company of my father. What a keen mind my father has always had for planning out fencing and plumbing projects, for estimating distance and materials required.
This is what I know: There's a way my father works, whether it's in the kind, calm words he offers to little calves in the pens or in the muscle he has put into a hard physical task. He gives off an exuberance and a wholeheartedness that tells me there has always been something of a boy about him, something so endearing.