Start with house, I guess.
This house.
Where I’m sitting.

First came September 1990.
Didn’t have a clue.
She drove blue Jimmy (with lift kit) after sushi on Hudson Street, Tribeca. Late and dark Friday and we’d been drinking saki with Chet Baker slow blues through nowhere Jersey, west and then north, over some bridge.
We’d only met the week before at end-of-season, inter-gender softball behind a church in East Hampton, me on first, she in right field. I didn’t know anything other than that she was tall (like me) with a Brit but colonial edge to voice. Australian? Kiwi? South African?
(First impression: high-powered Amazon. One drink at Lucky Strike, then forget it.)
“Who are you?” I asked, not intending to sound like lame pick-up.
“Who are you?” she fired back, rudely but flirty.
Turned out she was Dutch, from Amsterdam, lived and worked in London, thus Anglo accent, former model, now fashion designer with big sleepy eyes and long legs.
She’d been using my old outfielder’s glove and refused to give it back.
“It has ‘Gordon’ written on it,” she says. “You said your name was Alastair.”
“Yes. Gordon’s my last name.”
“Oh, OK,” her eyes turn up, then away, handing me the glove like she still didn’t believe it was mine.
Next day we went for picnic and swim at Accabonac and shared mutual passions for design, for dark British humor–Goon Show, Dudley Moore & Peter Cooke, Monty Python. Her father, a Communist architect, had been in German Concentration Camp while mine, a Scottish Presbyterian minister, had been in Japanese death camp, so we were off to a good start.
A week later I’m sitting in the passenger seat of her fashionably distressed GMC listening to Chet Baker and wondering where the Hell she’s taking me: past lakes, dumbstruck deer by edge of road, trailer park, back woods, abandoned boy scout camp.
She made a slight sucking sound between her teeth as she drove–trapped sashimi?–later confessing she’d popped a valium with the saki. For nerves.
Where the hell were we again?
She named a place I’d never heard of, way out of Manhattan-Hamptons-Maine-Princeton comfort zone.

What was that? A family of suicidal possums? Up winding, spooky lane lined with pines to small clapboard farmhouse with hand-hewn beams and big fireplace. Sounds of gurgling stream. Blue enameled antique stove and Dutch coffee grinder in kitchen.

Hmmm…
A little boy’s navy uniform hanging on bedroom wall had me flashing on Glenn-Close-in-Fatal-Attraction-style scenario, gorgeous but crazed, with no one ever finding my mutilated body parts.
Chet was singing Let’s Get Lost and I still didn’t know where I was but that’s how it felt, like when you get lost in the woods, a little scary at first and then not so scary as your eyes and body adjust to the surrounding environment. Then you let go, like with anesthesia, and succumb.
When I woke in morning she was already outside, standing in her underwear, shooting arrows at a target made of straw.
Diana.
Goddess of the Hunt, I thought.
Huntress.
There was a James Bond book sitting on the shelf and I could see that it was her on the cover, much younger, wrapped in furs, lying provocatively on a giant golden gun.

Diana of the Golden Gun.
Twenty-one years later this coming Labor Day weekend we’re still together but the house has expanded from that rough little hideaway to a fairly rambling residence/studio for work and four children, somehow, leaving 18th-Century parts in tact, paring back to original bones, while adding modern loft-like spaces to one side. “Best of both worlds,” we kept saying to ourselves and anyone else who bothered to ask.