I’m unemployed and I don’t have any office to go to every morning. I used to have a different place and different faces as part of my day. Not anymore.

I have to create a space of my own, separate from my home. The usual thing to do is to go to a coffee shop with my laptop, buy a coffee and a sweet and settle in.

I tried that, even going to a coffee shop a bit off my usual path. But after the second time I signed the check I started thinking: did it really have to cost money to leave my house?

The small town is so peaceful and pastoral. I walk my neighborhood every day. After all my travels this summer I’m seeing possibilities in the public spaces.

It could feel too pastoral, like there is so much nothing going on I might lay flat and join in the nothing.

And as soon as that thought appears, I think about the stuff that has happened in my life while I have been in this town. I am not great at doing nothing. RIGHT NOW it is peaceful, but I remember so many things that happened in this place.

It reminds me of those small incredibly peaceful villages in the countryside, typically England but it could be anywhere, which somehow provide the resident detective with regularly occurring murders to solve.

Murder, she wrote. And my favorite, Masterpiece mysteries from the BBC. For many years those were my favorite to watch as I fell asleep. Britain doesn’t have gunshots (as much) so it is peaceful to watch well-spoken people walk about finding clues and solving things.

I am giving it a try. I have a metal coffee cup with a lid. True, no one is here to refill it for me. But with my notebook, laptop and pen at a table by the park, there is some life in my morning.

Squirrels are chasing each other up the tree. One has a fat acorn in its mouth.

Two men are separately walking tiny dogs across the basketball court

A group of gray-haired women in knit leggings and athletic shoes are intent on getting the dance moves synchronized, as a graybeard runs the camera and sound system.

And a toddler give me side eye before she runs giggling to her person—Mama? Big sister?—by the playground.

Like ripples on a water’s surface, disturbances stay small in the larger context. I enjoy the bustle but it leaves me space to find my own drama. The clues can be seen to solves the mysteries of my life. I have my own personal murder village if I choose to look around. What excitement would I wish to experience. That’s what the pen and notebook are for.