A Clean Well-Lighted Place

I’ve stayed in plenty of hellish hotel rooms  - the one with sludge burbling up through the bathtub drain, the one where the single dim light crackled and went out the second I flipped the switch, the one whose door I opened for the first time to find it already occupied by a naked guy just toweling.  This past weekend though I stayed in the best hotel room of all, in the on-campus hotel at Indiana U - which amazes me mostly because on-campus hotels are usually pretty sad. I know I've never been able to stay in the one at Brown without feeling that I slept in a minimum security prison facility.But this one! It had 1930s-era casement windows! That actually opened! And when they did open they let me look out a stand of old trees under whose canopy lay  a tiny churchyard, where, for those three nights, the dead slept no more deeply than I did 60 feet above them.I took this picture at dawn of my second day and what a calm state the view alone put me in - or maybe it was the perfect pillows, four per bed. Or the fact that the bathroom, done in 1940s-era tiles, looked as clean as a just-polished diamond. All I know is I felt safer and more ‘held’ in that room for those three nights than I have felt since my baby days when I lay watching a summer sun creep up the wall by my crib and knowing that soon the kindly Tall People would come to lift me high and set me down in a brand new-day.