It has been a while since I last wrote about where I do my writing. Most recently, I opined about culling quite a bit of material from my home office; previously, I wrote about my then-new work office and my home office, with no few others before and amid them. I’m still in both of those offices at present; I am still working at the substance use facility, and I am still living in the trailer. But another place has emerged as a site where I write, and, since I’ve got something of a history discussing such places, I figured I ought to give it a spin.

I’ve noted that my daughter, Ms. 8, is enrolled in dance and cheer classes and is thriving in them; both remain the case. Of course, with concerns occasioned by COVID-19 and the recommended measures for balancing safety with access to activity, there have been some adjustments to how the classes are conducted. One of them has been that parents of most students in the classes are asked not to sit in the classroom and watch, as had been previous practice. (The dance school where my daughter studies teaches a class for toddlers; that class is the exception). Over the summer, Ms. 8 was in two back-to-back classes, and, as she is no longer a toddler, I have been waiting for her in my car: a red 2012 Ford Focus SEL Hatchback.

Now, as I’ve remarked once or twice, I live in the Texas Hill Country. In that part of the world, summer evenings are hot affairs; the sun is still in the often-cloudless sky, streaming heat, and the warmth it has given to the ground comes back out from it in force, making for a feeling not unlike a toaster oven, if less injurious. (Not “non-injurious,” however; people die from the heat here every year.) I haven’t minded sitting in it, though; I’ve been able to get a parking spot in the shade, and, with the windows down, it’s tolerable enough. (I need to be able to handle the local heat, anyway; I’d not be much good around here, otherwise.) But that’s still left me with an hour and a half or so to fill productively, which is an awkward amount of time for a nap, so that was right out (despite my wanting to take a nap more days than not, anymore).

No, what I’ve tended to do is write while I sit in my driver’s seat with the windows down and the summer air baking. It’s a bit cramped and badly angled for me to write with pen on paper, even if I ought to be better about writing in my journal, and I don’t typically carry a tablet with me; I don’t have a laptop anymore and have not for years, now. But I do have a phone and a reliable connection to the internet through it, so I am able to email poems to myself. They’re usually the short ones I post on my less-formal personal blog, put together several at a time and strangely cathartic; I tend to be in a decent head-space to head home after writing them.

Admittedly, typing into a phone and sending emails to myself are not the kind of things I had envisioned when I started writing about the places where I write. But even in that medium and in that milieu, writing is writing, and it should be clear that I think it a thing worth doing.

I’m in a new fiscal year at work. Care to help me get it started off right?