Dreaming My Way Home

& meditations on cottages, real and imagined

What a joy, coming home. I had been on the go—five long days of chemo in New York, a slate of work events, a handful of Jon’s tour stops in Nashville and Austin—and by the time I made it back, I was more ghost than woman. I dropped my suitcase by the door and stood there quietly for a moment, flooded with relief and gratitude, too, for this place I call my own. The dogs came thundering over, nails clicking like applause. (Honestly, is there anything better than a canine welcome home?)

I’ve always been preoccupied by the idea of home—a result, I think, of so much wandering in childhood. That wandering was a gift, but it left me craving roots. For most of my twenties, I lived in a 400-square-foot apartment in the East Village, railroad-style, with almost no natural light and windows that overlooked the dumpsters. Several times a day I’d be startled by a loud clang and, almost involuntarily, turn to make direct eye contact with someone in that rather private act of parting with their refuse. Humiliating for everyone involved, yet oddly intimate.

Don’t get me wrong—the apartment was great by New York standards, and I loved getting to live in the neighborhood where I was born. But due to my health, I worked exclusively from home, and that proved challenging. My bedroom was also my office: two feet from my mattress sat my desk, which was actually a picnic table salvaged from those same dumpsters. (Turns out there’s at least one perk to being dumpster-adjacent: first dibs on the good stuff.) By then Jon and I were dating, spending long stretches together in that matchbox apartment, and—perhaps unsurprisingly—the needs of an aspiring memoirist and a musician proved at odds. I needed silence; he needed sound. (“Music, not noise,” Jon would correct, while singing in an operatic baritone from the bathtub at an arm’s length from my Skype call.)

Long before it was in the realm of possibility, I began to fantasize about moving to a house in the country with a separate cottage where I could find creative solitude—a room of my own to write and to rest. That dream sharpened in the summer of 2020, when Jon and I left the city and spent the first months of the pandemic at my parents’ house, then living out of suitcases at an artist’s residency. I didn’t know where we’d go next, and the not-knowing wore on me.

That’s when my friend Hollye Jacobs shared a journaling prompt she swears by—one that’s become my own go-to when I’m feeling unmoored: Imagine yourself at some point in the future, living the life of your dreams—not a holiday or a special day, but a typical one. Where are you? What do you see, feel, hear, smell, taste? Who’s by your side?

The prompt, “A Day in the Life of My Dreams” (which appears in The Book of Alchemy), quietly reoriented me. At first, declaring what I wanted on the page felt exposing—and the future itself so uncertain that I struggled to imagine what could be. But I trusted Hollye. For months, I began my mornings by conjuring perfect everydays in ink. Some were variations on my real life; others were different in almost every respect. Yet certain details kept reappearing. There were always dogs (of course), and there was always a space of my own in the form of a little cottage.

Those throughlines became my compass, eventually leading me to a little house in rural New Jersey with a backyard potting shed refashioned into a workspace. “The cottage,” as I came to call it, was spare—no insulation, no heat beyond a woodstove—but it was full of charm and had wavy glass panes that looked onto the garden and just enough space for both work and rest. In winter, I wrote in fingerless gloves and a hat, looking like a chimney sweep who’d stumbled into a book deal. The cottage became the backdrop for my virtual Between Two Kingdoms book tour during the pandemic, and where I hung the bouquets of flowers that family sent. It’s where we organized the grassroots effort to have my friend Quintin “Lil’ GQ” Jones’s death sentence commuted, and then where I had my last conversation with him in the minutes before he was brought into the execution chamber. It’s where I grieved and raged, and where I wrote the journal entries that bloomed into The Book of Alchemy. It’s also where I learned my leukemia had returned, where I called my mom to tell her Jon and I were engaged, where we began filming American Symphony, and where I rested and painted when I finally came home from the hospital.

I thought I’d stay there forever. But life, as it does, went and rearranged the furniture. Later this month I’ll hand the keys over to its new stewards. I’ve packed up the last of our belongings and moved them to the farm where we’re making a new home. I’ve claimed the garage as a new room of my own. I painted the walls white, carved out corners for writing, painting, and rest, and set up my old picnic-table-dumpster desk. The other morning, as I journaled to “A Day in the Life of My Dreams,” Sunshine hopped up into the chair and tucked herself under my arm—the exact spot my late dog Oscar used to claim when I wrote to this prompt in the old cottage.

In this transitional moment, I feel a bit lost in the in-between. It’s time for me to conjure new dreams, and I’m trying to channel the playfulness with which children dream—expansively, without self-censorship. One day they’re marine biologists, the next ballerinas. They follow what sparks their curiosity and give themselves permission to change their minds about who they are and what they want. You can’t strong-arm life into staying as you’ve imagined it. When you hem in your imagination, you hem in your life. Still, the dreaming’s the point. It’s how we become. Before we build, we imagine; before we act, we picture what could be.

That’s the limitless power of the imagination—to concoct, to conjure. Sometimes the vision in your mind materializes into a home, a job, a new path in life. But there’s value in the act of imagining itself, which today’s guest essay shows us. It’s called “The Flying Cottage,” by community member and administrative law judge Denise McGorrin, and it’s both wonderfully practical and mystical.

May it help you fly from fear, toward something fantastical.

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Prompt 355. The Flying Cottage by Denise McGorrin

I have had some scary medical moments. A childhood bleeding disorder. Thyroid cancer in my 20s that required three surgeries and full body radiation followed by total seclusion. Nothing came in or out of the room, except meals slid under my door; I stacked the empty (increasingly stinky) food clamshells in a corner. When my daily Geiger counter reading showed that the radiation in my body was safe enough for me to be within ten feet of others, I was released and chased my brother around a park. Later a ruptured brain aneurysm led to slinky-shaped coils being inserted in my brain. Then came a second, slow-growing but incurable blood cancer two decades after the first, likely caused by the radiation. I was given eight years to live and have now lived seventeen years without treatment.

Because of these experiences, I recognized early that I shouldn’t wait to pursue my passions, so I put myself out there. I traveled, hiking in the mountains in Nepal, whitewater rafting all around the world, and exploring Maya ruins in Central America. I realized my dream of moving to the Pacific Northwest, where I love working as a state judge and gardening.

I’m incredibly fortunate that I survived, and I’ve lived a wonderful life, but some emotional wounds from my medical history have never fully healed. I have one particular nemesis—I call him My Octopus of Fear, or Moof for short. Moof visits now and then, always at night. He glides sideways into my bedroom in a cloud of ink and speaks in a very reasonable and convincing voice about horrible medical fates that await me. If I don’t banish Moof quickly, he slides his tentacles around my body, encasing me in fear.

Moof is fiendishly creative, so I have to be too. Here is my most recent tactic to keep Moof away: I have an invisible magical flying cottage that floats in the air near my house. The cottage has big windows and is filled with vases of peonies and pictures of bats and owls and birds, all the things I love. There are comfortable beds for me, my cats Seamus and Limerick, as well as pillows for all of the other dogs and cats I have had during my lifetime. There are spare bedrooms for family and friends. The cottage can take me anywhere in the world, planet, or universe in seconds. When I get in bed, I decide where I will go that night.

Two nights ago, I flew to the artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s house in New Mexico. It was early fall. At sunset, Georgia and I climbed the ladder on the side of her adobe house to the rooftop, where we watched colors of orange and red move and fade over hoodoos, spires, and mushroom-shaped rock formations. When the sun had set and twilight surrounded us, Georgia and I drank earthenware mugs of tea and sat in silence. There was a slight breeze in the air that ever so slowly and almost imperceptibly twitched the leaves of a mesquite bush.

Last night, I flew to the plains of the Midwest on a warm summer afternoon. There was a girl named Maeve and her roan-colored cattle dog, Finn. Maeve had a red shoe lace in her left shoe and a yellow shoe lace in her right shoe. Maeve and Finn watched the wind flow through a wheat field, revealing each row of wheat, one by one. Maeve decided to build a kite colored with plums, raspberries, and apricots. After Maeve finished coloring the sail, she attached it to a wooden frame. Maeve then attached a blue line that blended into the sky. Maeve and Finn ran along the top of a ridge with the kite. It flowed through the sky like the wind through the wheat field.

Take that, Moof.

Your prompt for the week:

Imagine your own magical flying cottage to evade your Moof. Choose the style, the size, the contents. Then embark on your first journey—where do you go, what do you see, who joins you there?

Today’s Contributor—

Denise McGorrin lives in Portland, Oregon, with her rescue cats, Seamus and Limerick. Denise’s favorite time of day is twilight, which she enjoys in her garden, where she grows peonies, dahlias, and roses. Denise is an administrative law judge for the state of Oregon. She recently completed walking the trilogy of twelfth-century stone labyrinths laid in the floors of medieval cathedrals in France.

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