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A friend from the Midwest called the other day and said the sky was heavy with drizzle and a fall chill lingered in the air.
In Tampa, we have no way of marking the seasons, really, other than the wreaths we hang on our front doors, so I reflected on my year to date and what has been done and left undone.
I realized that for the first time in a couple of summers, I haven't traveled to my cherished home away from home, a place I hold so close to my heart that I sometimes feel a catch in my throat when I think about it.
Even the name is so perfect I can't think of anything better:
The Clearing.
Founded by Jens Jensen, the progressive Danish-born landscape architect who designed the grounds of the Armour, Ford and Florsheim estates, Jensen built the Clearing as a summer home and folk school where city people like me could learn "sound values" for life and work.
Imagine for a minute this postcard mailed from heaven: a cluster of cabins, a lodge and a schoolhouse nestled on 128 wooded acres along the shores of Green Bay. The buildings made of wood and native stone have stood since 1935 in northern Door County, Wis., and are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Students come to the Clearing to study writing, chamber music, painting, furniture making, bread baking, philosophy, quilting and yoga, all taught in the noncompetitive Danish folk school style.
They come to canoe and hike the trails and meadows and dip in the chilly waters of Wisconsin's lakes and rivers.
I have taken workshops in fiction writing and poetry here, spending my nights in a rustic cabin, sleeping beneath patchwork quilts sewn in previous summers by fellow students, waking in the mornings to walk in the woods and later drink coffee in the great old lodge filled with books and arts-and-crafts style furniture designed by Jensen himself.
It is the way home should be, I believe, a place where you are so in touch with the natural world around you that you fall into its rhythms.
Here, sunset becomes a ritual, a time when everyone stops what they are doing and hikes to a vista overlooking the bay to watch.
Wildflowers are revered.
Cell phones are not.
The Clearing offers no television, radio or Internet. Because of that, most people devour books, write amazing things, paint with abandon, learn the names of birds, trees and flowers.
A pileated woodpecker suddenly has meaning.
So does a ladyslipper.
Best of all, deep friendships are formed in a matter of days.
Meals are eaten family style at long tables. The china is heavy Blue Willow and probably as old as the lodge itself; the food, homey and good and prepared by a troupe of summer employees who come to work at the Clearing just for the joy of being there.
And always, someone reads a scrap of philosophy or a poem before a meal.
I have an old Clearing cookbook - filled with sketches of wildflowers and snippets of wisdom - and sometimes in my own kitchen, I cook the famous Clearing baked chicken just to smell the familiar aroma while I write.
There have been no other students from Florida during my visits, but my poetry teacher the summer before last had just kayaked through the Everglades and as a result wrote a beautiful book of poems, The Only Everglades in the World (Parallel Press, 2001, University of Wisconsin-Madison).
One week here can change a person forever.
I learned that that I can live happily with a few changes of clothes, a couple of notebooks and some good books to read.
I learned that new is not necessarily more desirable than old.
I learned that I can live without television.
Really.
I have met people - serious people with ambition and advanced degrees - so transformed by the experience that they gave up fancy jobs just to live and work at the Clearing in the summers.
Long before subdivisions and strip malls, Jensen, a tenacious force behind the Illinois State Park system and the forest preserves of Chicago, worried about the effects of urban development and the automobile.
"Soon our wilderness and woodlands will be a thing of the past," Jensen wrote. "We have arrived at the crossroads. Which way are we going?"
Born in 1860, Jensen, who lived briefly in Florida before settling for good in the Chicago area, was considered a reformer and visionary.
His circle of friends included Jane Addams, Carl Sandburg and Frank Lloyd Wright.
Jensen believed that we should live close to the ecology of our native surroundings. He stressed that a garden must have the "soul of the native landscape" in it, that you cannot "transpose a Florida or Iowa garden to California and have it feel true."
But even in paradise, Jensen needed his own place to escape.
His "cliff house" still stands at the Clearing, a narrow, one-room cabin perched precariously atop a ledge overlooking the bay.
It's a long, lonely trek from the main lodge and has no amenities other than a mattress, a kerosene lamp and a writing table.
If you're cold, you gather wood and build a fire.
The fearless sign up the first day.
I always hesitated.
Early one evening I saw an 80-something Clearing student climbing to the cliff house carrying kindling for a fire.
She was going to do it. Why couldn't I?
But when I went to sign up, every night had been spoken for.
Next year, I thought.
Next year.
But there wasn't a next year.
Life and circumstances kept me away.
I tape a picture of the cliff house to my refrigerator, hoping I will go back someday.
If I don't, Jensen's teachings have forever shaped my thoughts about community, the environment and home.
Jensen said that home "is the inner closet in which we enter, close the door and seek within."
Maybe that's all I ever really needed to know.