I have been temporarily in Cambridge for seven years.

I never expected to put down roots. As the Dean of Graduate Studies in the History Department said back in 1999, as we all clustered around for his introductory pep talk, “Cambridge is a very nice place to live. It is also a very nice place to leave.” They would really like us, he said chattily, to be out within ten years. Five years would be ideal (this with a wistful glance around the room, at all our eager young faces shining with dissertations yet unwritten, ideal as only unwritten dissertations still can be), but few people ever managed the five year plan. Seven, he admitted, was about the norm.

Seven years. I figured I could handle Cambridge for that long. Sure, it had its drawbacks, like a lack of cabs when you needed them, or those pesky brick streets that seemed to have been specially designed to catch the unguarded heel, but it was only seven years. I could cope.

I didn’t buy “real” furniture, because my apartment was only temporary, a stopgap between college and the real world. Instead, I furnished in an eclectic mix of battered antiques and haute Walmart, faux Hogarth etchings and reproduction tapestries. I resisted acquiring appliances—they would only have to be moved eventually anyway—and my clothes made seasonal pilgrimages to my parents’ apartment in New York. After all, I didn’t really live here. I was just here for school. Temporarily.

Temporary adds up. So do books and shoes and those inevitable knick-knacks that attach to birthdays and holidays like confetti to a parade ground (in this case, five mismatched candleholders, an egg cup shaped like a broody chicken, and something that I think is supposed to be a picture frame, but have never figured out). After seven years, my temporary residence managed to look pretty solid. It had become, despite itself, a home.

As I sit here, seven years on, surrounded by drifts of cardboard boxes (filled with candleholders and eggcups and obscene numbers of books), some of the leaving has already been done for me, as Cambridge changed around me, leaving me before I had a chance to leave it. The photo shop where I used to develop my snapshots before the advent of digital photography has disappeared, replaced by an ice cream shop. Express has become EMS, the pan-Asian restaurant turned into a snazzy dessert place, and where Abercrombie and Fitch once sprawled now hunch a row of ATMs. I’m sure a sociologist could read all sorts of trends into these shifts. All I know is that I’m constantly walking past stores that aren’t there anymore.

The Cambridge I’m going to miss isn’t the defunct Express or the new dessert place (well, maybe the new dessert place—they mix delicious white chocolate martinis). All three of the books in the Pink Carnation series were largely written during my sojourn beside the red brick walls of Harvard Yard. My characters may not actually ever make it to Cambridge (even if Eloise, my modern heroine, is a Harvard graduate student), but Cambridge is there in the books nonetheless. Every inch of text is imprinted with a material memory.

Amy climbed into a boat in the Seine as I hunched over my laptop at the battered front desk in the History Department library, desperately hoping that none of the first year grad students studying so diligently behind me would be moved to peek over my shoulder at my “dissertation notes”. That scene there, the one where Jane speaks in poetic code with Augustus Whittlesby in “Black Tulip”—that was written on a bitter cold January day, in my favorite back table at the Broadway Market Starbucks, lightheaded (and slightly ill) from two lattes one after the other, greedily guzzled for warmth. Even Geoffrey Pinchingdale-Snipe’s primary seat owes its name to a fluke of local geography. I had been invited to a dinner at my medieval history professor’s house, a long, long way down Brattle Street to a cul de sac called Sibley Court. The name lingered pleasantly on the tongue. I tried it out a few times as I walked down Brattle, past the concrete block of the American Reparatory Theatre and the leafy calm of professors’ houses. “It’s a long way to Sibley Court.” And, lo, Geoff had a country estate in Gloucestershire.

I could go on and on for pages, mapping out every inch of the books like a medieval cartographer, indexing each twist and shift of plot and character to its corresponding Cambridge topography. That plotting epiphany as I was hurrying to meet a friend at Peet’s Coffee; the time I had to plop down on a bench on a concrete island midway between the law school and the grocery store, surrounded by traffic, and write an entire scene of Pink III before it got away…. Books never confine themselves neatly to the space between the desk chair and the keyboard; they sprawl to touch every inch of the landscape and infuse it with extraterritorial significance.

Do you have your own private literary landscapes that overlap with the more mundane geography of the material world? Are there places that are linked in your mind with particular scenes in books you’ve either written or read?