north-east re-entrant · obtuse, sunless · always dark, never empty
where the north wall turns east and the building folds in on itself, the two eaves come to meet at an inside corner. the angle is obtuse — a little over a hundred degrees, so the architect's pencil declared — and the result is a small wedge of overhang from which the sun is excluded all year. no hour of the day finds it. no season corrects this.
what lives here lives by other means. dark moss, an inch deep along the foot of the wall; some small black beetles the gardener has never quite identified; and, in a recess just under the apex of the corner, a wax-paper wasp's nest the size of a fist, abandoned for at least five years, that no one has the heart or the courage to remove. the owl has perched here once, perfectly silent, in december; the cat noticed without going closer.
after rain the corner stays wet for a day longer than the rest of the building. in frost it holds ice for a week. in snow the snow piles in a curious double drift, as though two snows were having an argument and neither winning. you can stand at the angle and look up. the underside of the eave is the colour of nothing in particular, and very close.
field-note · far corner a wren passed this corner once, in a hurry, and turned back without entering. since then, no wren. the corner is on the wrens' map; it is marked otherwise.