I spent a well-deserved day of respite at home today. This was not entirely intentional. It came about mostly because of a long series of appointments, repairs, and restorations that I've been putting off for the last month while scrambling to put together a few grant applications. One can only temporarily put off essential life-sustaining activities such as clearing the driveway of garbage and finding a place to sleep for house guests who are arriving shortly. So between answering the door for delivery and service people, I've been spending a lot of effort making small oases of space in which they can work.
I'm fascinated by how tiny changes in the locations of a big stack of boxes or a wayward armchair can entirely change the character of a room. The room I'm sitting in right now is a large basement bedroom that I've just reclaimed from one of my children who has just moved into university residence. For the past couple of years, I've known this space as one filled with underwear hanging from hooks on the walls (not kidding) and gigantic mounds of laundry and study notes all mixed together on the floor. Now it has a spartan arrangement of a couple of chairs, a desk, and a bookshelf. Of course the room looks a lot bigger, but it speaks an entirely different language as well. Like an immigrant to a new culture, it contains some old vestiges of its former self -- the impossibly ugly wall hangings and the pile of teen kitsch on top of the old dresser. But there's a new being -- cool, quiet, reserved and brimming with possibilities. I want to sit in here and interrogate the space.
The route to this room winds through much of the rest of the basement. It would take too long to explain how this came to be, but there's one way in and one way out of here, and it is at the end of a long corridor. For the past two years, that corridor has been filled with things that were dropped into place virtually on the day that we moved in. Boxes of tools, books, and those odds and ends that somehow seemed too important to leave behind, yet were almost certainly destined to remain unused for decades if not forever (when did I think I would have time or that it would be a good idea to make my own beer?). Now with all of that stuff moved aside, put away, discarded when I could bear to part with it (my water meter repair guy just made off with a terrific foozball table that just didn't have a leg to stand on), I see spaces of different shapes and sizes. The actual changes are small, but the effects they have on me are profound. Now, not only does the room I'm in call to me from every other part of the house, but the hallway pours me into it as surely as a slender-necked pitcher pours a steady stream of water into a waiting glass.
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