On my way up north, I made a slight detour and availed myself of my aunties' treehouse attic in Cape Cod for a few days. I biked up and down the arm of the Cape, visited beaches, ate lots of chowder and donuts, and enjoyed the company of some good folks who also happened to be vacationing on the Cape as well.

It was their idea on my last day to visit the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth Port. Antonia had been before, and talked fondly of what it felt like to stand in his kitchen and imagine him standing there too in the fading light of the kitchen window, getting ready to feed his cats, maybe making a cup of tea.

It's a sacred thing to visit an artist's or author's house, to see how they live outside of their work, to see their things in place, the things they collect. Weathervanes. The ends of curtain rods. Little glass objects on the windowsill. Something as intimate as the marks his shoes made going up the staircase, or the placement of the toaster on the counter. Even the homes of authors I've never even visited (homes that may not even exist) invade my dreams sometimes, so fascinated am I by their things.

Antonia stood in the kitchen and inhaled deeply; I excused myself to use the bathroom, probably just to say I'd been in Edward Gorey's bathroom.

Gorey's presence followed me up north, where shadows looked like etchings, strange noises took on wild presences in our imaginations, things we might have named "Curious Tethering Snifflegrabs" in his honor. I read The Other Statue out loud by the campfire.

In the folly a candlestick mounted on a horse's hoof rested on page 47 of The Romance of a Soda Cracker.

Appropriately, I came across these photos of Edward Gorey's house taken the week of his death just a few minutes after I'd finished writing this post. (via NYRB)