Saturday, June 5, 2010

Solitude and a Room of One's Own


Who knew better than Virginia?  Personal space is so very important.  We will be moving shortly into a house of our own, within which I will have a room of my own.  I've always had a room to work in, but it has always been shared with storage and extra furniture, our library, and so forth because always in the past our home has been too small.  In my past life I had a larger house which I called the library, I didn't feel any need for art space then.  But everyone else in the house would clean the living room by dumping the excess into my room. 

Currently, in my new life, our two bedroom condo/townhouse/duplex/apartment has very little room and very little storage.  My wingspan is far too wide for this and I look forward to moving into the house we are purchasing.  The room you see in the photo above is to be my art room.  It has everything I could dream of, a large walk-in closet, a window seat, some built in shelves and space for tables and chairs and whatever else I need. 

My current "room of shame" has had every possible enhancement to help straighten it out, and the perimeter of it is quite nicely organized, but the remaining 7X7 space is a veritable sea of crap.  Boxes of collageables, paper cutter, unshelved books and magazines, art supplies and more art supplies.  In order to find one thing, three more must be moved.  This detritus will fit nicely into the closet of the room pictured above.  It is a dream come true. 

Solitude is quite another thing.  While I have quite an independent streak (noted early on in a report card, "M is sometimes too independent").  I should probably blow that up on a copier and frame it.  But Gryphon and I are very close.  We spend most of our time together.  I thought early on in our relationship that I would feel smothered by that, remembering being a mother of three and sometimes feeling like an anthill.  I remember one time trying to put on my makeup in the bathroom and being joined methodically by every single family member until I blew my cool and ordered them all out.  But I don't feel that way now. 

I still crave solitude, but I do find it here and there and it is wonderful.  Mostly I just crave room enough to move around in.  I have a recurring dream, a house dream, in which at one point I enter a sunny room, empty of furnishings with a golden oak floor and I turn to my young daughters and tell them, "this is the room for dancing". 



No comments: