I asked myself some new questions in an island cabin on Puget Sound two years ago.
I was visiting my daughter who was recently bereaved of a child. We sat together and painted and talked, and watched the embers of the woodstove collapse and hiss late at night. We walked the pebbly beach and looked, and found enjoyment and comfort in each other’s company. And in moments alone on many of those island days, I also pondered my life back home in the east coast city, looking long-lensed back, and dared to ask a quiet question of where to build more thinking space into my day and home.
Comforted, we parted, to continue our lives a coast apart but still talk often. I carried my “view from where I sit” ideas home but returned to the hubbub of teaching, debate tournaments, struggles, and life. It didn’t seem possible that space could be found.
There was much good. Typewriters continued to gather into a collection. We began to host a community letter writing night, to attend a monthly typewriter poetry teen event, writing on-the-spot poems for library patrons. I taught nature journaling that year and this, and now high school nonfiction, and continued to educate my last two at home.
Then the chance was given. Would I like studio space? Would I?!
First the idea, the sketches, and possibilities, then the reality began to form in what was a dilapidated space. After years of small, cramped, and crowded, this gift of light and margin has been humbling, hard to believe, but given and gratefully embraced.
The Low Down Garret Space
By definition a garret is an attic, a high space, a sequestered and set apart spot. I could not see my way to a true garret.
My spare, quiet, gray-floored, white-walled space, all windows and calm, right in the midst of the city, is the entrance to my home. I can be alone here by rising to catch the dawn, but in the middle of the day, it is a hive of coming and going, of conversation and news.
And that is just right. I don’t need to be permanently sequestered. Just to know the quietness at dawn and the closed-door moments of loveliness to think.
In this space is emerging a year of deep thinking, reading, research. Some long writing projects are incubating here.
It is fully furnished now. I am not a minimalist and books and art tools and plants flow. A cabinet of typewriters fills the corner and the room has reached a happy feeling of ‘done’ over the course of a year.
But this was the initial filling of space, in those first wonder-filled weeks of disbelief.
And the island cabin, we just revisited, welcoming a new grandchild, most gratefully received. An ebb and flow of the tide continues there and here, and we rejoice each day for these many gifts.
