 |
| Image stolen from Brownstoner.com: http://www.brownstoner.com/brownstoner/archives/2005/04/today_on_the_re_13.php |
It often comes in the form of an attic I'd never discovered -- or some doorway on the other side of a closet. One room leading to another. Stairs going down to landings that connect to places that look like whole apartments in themselves.
There are things I'd like to do, certainly, and I need a place to do them. I want to have a writing room, a dance studio – somewhere for making leaps.
It seems too good to be true – and true enough; it is too good; all that's true of a dream is that it is a dream.
But in the dream, as one can see, mere relief has turned to joy. Where have these rooms been keeping themselves? How could I not have noticed these doors, these passages? Each room is empty. Each contains an entire possible new life.
The space is never very nice per se. Not in the traditional sense. Which only tells me that in many ways this house, of which I am now -- in the real world, post-divorce -- sole proprietor, is exactly what I'd dreamed of. The possibility room is rough, rustic. Each one of them is. The walls need a coat of paint -- look as though hey've needed it for years. But perhaps there is always something charming. Victorian wainscotting maybe. Certainly doors and window frames beyond the flatness of current design.
“If you build it, they will come,” goes the cliche.
Halfway through the summer, climbing up on a ladder in my underwear in one-hundred-degree weather, it did occur to me one day, quite suddenly, that I might be fixing the rooms up for myself. What a thought. Truly living in my own house.
The idea had really been, of course, that I would somehow find a new tenant -- someone better, someone without heavy footsteps above me, someone without a stereo, someone who didn't collect furniture from dumpsters. That continued to be the plan, but I began making floor plan sketches, first in my mind and then on paper: my bed would fit best this way, and if I looked up I would be able to see the moon through the top of the tree in they yard. The chairs could be grouped around the fireplace, and I could leave most of the room empty to let the light in.
It felt like a wish. I dreamed of situations that would allow me to be able to afford to have it all for myself. What had I been thinking? All those wads of cash the tenants had paid me, all of those checks to my divorce attorney, all of the credit card bills for pest-proofing the walls – so much money slipping through my hands this past year, my bank accounts now all but purged.
My barn burned down, the saying goes. Now I can see the moon.
