In a green shade

Still musing on crowleycrow 's Utopian talk at Readercon.  Some of us have been imagining Audenic Edens ever since.  Mine would give me a stone manor house--a little one, like Green Knowe--in a Cloudish sort of landscape.  Not the howling moors part of it, but Dales/Cumbria, with pleasant little mountains.  There'd be proper woods, though, with flaming bright New England falls and deep-snow winters.  (I would have red squirrels and hedgehogs, bluebells and blackthorn; but also dogwoods, sugar maples, and real fireflies, not glowworms.)  The springs would be English and endless, and the summers green and dappled, bright but never hot.  I'd ask for lots of wind and rain.  The seacoast would be near enough when I wanted it, a walk.  The cloudscapes would be fabulous.  The night sky would be truly dark, ablaze with stars.

Oh dear.  I guess I'd need servants—say, a gardener and a fabulous cook.  But she'd be drily witty, wise, and independent.  She'd have a kitchen like Mr. Badger's, in which I could visit her by invitation, for a pot of tea and new bread.  Perhaps the bookshelves and the blue-and-white would dust themselves.

The cities would be Florence in the 1500s, Prague in 1910—with bits of Delft and Bruges.  But then any museum that I wanted, any theatre, any library, would be a pleasant train ride with a book and a basket of sandwiches.  I could pop over to the Globe in 1600 for the afternoon; or buy a picture of Vermeer's at his studio.

And all my friends would have portals.  We could visit, inter-Eden.

Nine