The following is a piece I submitted to www.writingfromtheheart.com. The writing prompt was ~ The Emergency Room.
The Emergency Room. My contingency plan. I’m resting in it now. It used to be a living room, with a small white leather couch, facing the unused fireplace. In theory, a retreat room, but with no doors and no privacy, not really a place to which I could retreat with three children in the near-by family room playing Ninja, watching TV, fighting, banging, clomping, and opening cabinet doors in the kitchen that would make me think, “Huh? What are they into now?”
We thought to keep the room nice for company, a place without toys, but anybody who ever visited us lingered in the spacious family room with a double slider view of our back yard, and milled around the kitchen island in the warmth of cherry cabinets. The living room was an unused annex.
So, we turned it into a dining room. Long dark birch table with ivory painted legs, matching birch windsor chairs, set on a braided rug of rusts and browns. Hired an electrician to hang a chandelier from the center of the ceiling. Tucked a glass fronted hutch filled with Waterford crystal and Buchnan pottery in a corner. Created a place to host holiday dinners with a crackling fire for good cheer. Which we did, once or twice. But, we spent most of our holiday dinners at our in-laws, and most of our family time, eating in the kitchen. For the majority of the year, the formal dining-room was nothing more than a 10’x12’ setting for country charm that I dusted sporadically, and glanced at occasionally, on my way up the stairs with baskets of folded laundry.
And so, we transformed it again, back into a livingroom. With the children older, I found I did have moments. Sitting on a small, forest green velvet sofa, I read under the light of a tarnished, brass floor lamp. But not often. The room was still the step-child of the house. Even with the bricked fireplace, it had no personality, no allure, no real purpose.
Until, I added a desk. Mid-life awakenings, and rumbling creative urges, and I wanted a place to write. I eyed a long, narrow buffet table with a leaf that could be extended for extra width as a potential writing desk. With that one subversive act, the room became mine ~ my emergency room, the room in which I would begin to emerge, as a seeker, writer, artist.
Even without doors I managed to steal private time. I began to love my room. Here I did not have to accommodate others’ wishes, or belongings, or design choices. Not since the days of being a teen-aged girl in a room painted lavender with a purple shag rug, had I known such design freedom.
As if I had been given a blank canvas, and a new set of acrylic paints, I used my freedom to cover the dark green wallpaper with lucious images dripping in color. I ripped from gardening magazines, photos of flowers ~ bold hibiscuses in oranges and yellows blooming in terra cotta urns ~ velvet roses in fusias and reds climbing up white trellises. I lusted for beach scenes ~ a villa in the Greek Isles, an uninhabited white sand hide-away in the Caribbean, an Adirondack chair set against a Cape Cod surf. I covered the mantle with shells and seaglass and starfish. Filled the bookshelves with my favorite authors and poets. Built a collection of music to fill my space with sound. Placed a standing wrought iron candle holder on the fireplace hearth.
And oh, the joy of buying touchstones for my writing desk ~ a pink alabaster paperweight in the shape of a heart, a child’s toy kaleidoscope, glass fish in tropical colors. For the first time since we bought the house, the room had a personality. Because it was taking on my personality, it was as “in the middle of the mix” as I was at mid-life. My room and I were a little bit old, a little bit new, and a lot not yet revealed, but shimmering on the horizon.
I emerged as a writer in this room. First essays, and then poetry, memoir pieces, and now, the start of a novel. I don’t remember which came first, my membership in a writer’s group, or the claiming of my creative space, but in my mind, the two are linked. In baskets overflowing, in binders protective, in files on my laptop, this room now houses my work, the work that proves, See? I only needed the space to write, and voila!
Three years in, my husband stripped the deep green wall paper, painstakingly respackled the damaged walls, and I chose, with no second opinion, a soft shade of ocean blue paint. Rainbow colored seaglass spills out of glass bowls and candy dishes all over “Mom’s room.” Hanging in front of the white sheer curtained windows are aqua and purple starfish, and a witch’s orb swirling in amethyst and yellow. And, another surprise I could not have predicted before moving in. A jeweler’s craft table sits opposite my writer’s desk, with a different type of work in progress ~ the seaglass necklaces and earrings I sell to stores.
My eighteen year old daughter loves my room. She asks me, after seeing a floral collage in process, if I’ll make one for her room. She admires a new seaglass pendant, dangling against a white velvet board, and I give it to her. I’m glad my daughter will remember watching me breath life into a space that was form without function. What I might have become, had I not, in perfect time, found my own “emergency” room.
