My first memory of space is summer squash light floating mellow under a sheet we draped over the dining chairs, backs in, touching almost, a circle. Sunshine lazered in through a pin hole, dust dancing its track onto the Linoleum. I remember how I felt in that space. It was my place. Personal. Ordered. Quiet. Like a baby Muskox, It protected me, sheltered me away from the outside world. Mom knew to knock on a chair first, "May I come in?" "Permission Granted." 
 
The peanut butter jelly sandwiches we shared, tasted better in there, I swear. 
 
My second memory of space is the corrugated steel ceiling that vaulted over the top bunkbed, almost touching my left shoulder, ending and then descending past the thin wall that separated mom and dad's bedroom from us boys. The married-family-army-quanset-hut swamp cooler struggled wet against the summer Tucson heat. But at night, I could lay there, moving my palm up and down the curving metal ridges and valleys, feeling exactly, the cool curving of desert nights. 
 
I dreamed of caves and soaring cathedral arches.
 
My third memory of space is punctured by a tractor falling into it.
 
Scottsdale, Arizona. Our house sat on the edge of the beginning of post-World War Two sprawl and a cotton-field painted bumpy deep green, miles into the foothills of McDowell Mountain. 
 
There was nothing to do in the summer out there in the stuffy, sticky of July, except make cool, make shade. 
 
The Great Escape with Steve McQueen and Charles Bronson had just come out. 
 
I directed my younger brothers and a neighbor kid to dig our own tunnel starting on the private side of our six foot high Duly-Block prison wall. There was no way to hide what we were doing from the Gestapo, so we told the truth, mostly. Frau Mom could see from her look out tower kitchen window that we were digging a dug-out fort. 
 
"Just clean up your mess before your dad gets home!" 
 
What Frau didn't see was the twenty foot long tunnel going under the wall and into the cotton field. 
 
We worked at night, able now to pop up outside the prison walls. We cut an eight foot by eight foot by three foot deep bunker, careful to cut in a ledge six inches down, around all four sides. Scrap plywood and two by fours salvaged from the hundred homes spouting up around ours, set onto the ledge and formed the roof. We had carefully dug under the roots of the cotton plants and returned them to their nesting place, earth intact, never thinking about how cotton was harvested or when.
 
We loved that bunker! Niches for candles, sandwiches, comic books, magazines. A cigar box bound with a boy-scout belt, filled with firecrackers, lighter fluid, kite-string, matches, a magnifying glass: our Secret-Agent-Man, pyromanical-box-of-invincibility. 
 
We would disappear for hours during the hot, humid afternoons and pretend. At night we planned our capers.
 
We were back at school, thank God, when the farmer came to talk to my dad.
 
The liability of being an architect is second only to the guilt of being a kid. It's something you live with but it doesn't stop you from exploring, from discovering, from forming and creating and enjoying great spaces.
 
Words. Musical notes. Numbers imagined. Walls, floors, ceilings, containers of the vibration of space. The only never-ending frontier.
 
When nobody's watching, go ahead, get the dining room chairs and a sheet.
 
Dream backwards and smile in the summer squash mellow light of dusty dancing memories.