Click on this photo to see it in the KHS photo note cards/prints gallery.Last week, parked on Martha’s Vineyard in Menemsha facing the harbor on a grey, cold day, I was in a happy place.  My husband was interviewing some local fishermen in a nearby boat for a story he’s writing.  I was bundled in a down coat and polar-fleece hat, absorbing the waning heat from the car ride up Island.  I had a new novel to entertain me, which I’d bought the day before at the 50%-off end-of-season sale at Edgartown Books.  It was a pretty entertaining and somewhat ribald read (This Is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper) about a dysfunctional, East-Coast family of adults sitting shiva for the family patriarch, an atheist. 

In between pages, I looked through the windshield at the battered fishing boat strapped to the dock below and the group of men huddled inside the wheel house.  I could see my husband’s wool-capped head bent over his reporter’s note pad.  A glance to my right revealed more of the nearly empty parking lot, wind-blown beach and frozen breakwater beyond.  Then back to my book.  This was cozy bliss.

We all know of places we associate with happiness.  It might be your childhood home, your kitchen, a garden, a town square, even a market.  I could make a long list.  I imagine sometimes we’re projecting what we feel on these places, and other times these places are projecting themselves on our feelings.  If we could decipher the specific qualities of the places which make us happy, then, surely, we could create places with incorporate those characteristics in order to foster our happiness.  This is, in part, the subject of Alain de Botton’s The Architecture of Happiness which I reviewed here.

When I apply my understanding of architectural space to my experience parked in Menemsha, I realize part of what appealed to me was my ability to experience a larger space or vista from within the comfort of a bordering, more intimate space.