<p style=’text-align: center;’><strong>Paintings </strong></p>
<p class=’p1′ style=’text-align: center;’>Forty years ago, Wood moved into her 1,000-square-foot house as a fledgling writer with a non-writerly day job. She began collecting her artist friends’ work, like this pastoral oil painting by <a href=’https://www.lindsayhancockart.com/’ target=’_blank’ rel=’noopener noreferrer’>Lindsay Hancock</a> and abstract watercolor and ink by <a href=’http://www.jennyscheu.com/’ target=’_blank’ rel=’noopener noreferrer’>Jenny Scheu</a>. “I think the wish to have visual art around had to do with wanting a creative life myself.”</p>
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<p style=’text-align: center;’><strong>Translations</strong></p>
<p class=’p1′ style=’text-align: center;’>A stack of 16 translations of Wood’s novel <i>The One-in-a-Million Boy</i> is a colorful conversation starter. The titles of the French and Italian versions, for example, translate as <i>Little Surprises on the Road to Happiness.</i> “And they have a flying whale on the cover for no reason I can fathom.”</p>
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<p style=’text-align: center;’><strong>Friendship Birds</strong></p>
<p class=’p1′ style=’text-align: center;’>Wood’s best friend, Denise Vaillancourt, bought these handmade wooden birds for her decades ago in Burundi, where tradition dictates that they must be displayed facing each other. “I move objects around, retire them, bring them out later, but the birds have been out ever since Denise gave them to me. Those birds are my friendship with Denise.”</p>
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<p style=’text-align: center;’><strong>Still Lifes</strong></p>
<p class=’p1′ style=’text-align: center;’>A pair of bookish still lifes bought by Wood’s sister and friend, independently, at the same shop in Italy. “It was so great that two people in a foreign country happened upon the same store and saw the same type of object and thought, ‘Oh, we need to get this for Monica.’”</p>
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<p style=’text-align: center;’><strong>Minature Shakespeare Library</strong></p>
<p class=’p1′ style=’text-align: center;’>“I was reading something about ‘more dead bodies than the last act of <i>Hamlet</i>,’ so I just pulled it out to see how many there actually were. It was a lot. There are a lot of dead bodies on the floor at the end of <i>Hamlet</i>.”</p>
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<p style=’text-align: center;’><strong>Couches</strong></p>
<p class=’p1′ style=’text-align: center;’><span class=’s1′>When these spirited red couches, an impulse buy from Portland’s <a href=’http://hubfurnitureco.com/’ target=’_blank’ rel=’noopener noreferrer’>Hub Furniture</a>, arrived much too high, Wood burst into tears. “The next thing I know, my husband, Dan, is down in the cellar with a power saw going. He took 3 inches off the legs, and they were perfect.” </span></p>
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<p style=’text-align: center;’><strong>Lilacs</strong></p>
<p class=’p1′ style=’text-align: center;’>The living room looks out over a massive century-old lilac bush. “I have no idea how to prune lilacs, but I’ve been hacking at it over the years, and this year we had a bonanza, this beautiful harvest. There’s nothing that says spring like the scent of lilacs.”</p>
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