► Listen to this article.

 
You dream of rooms that you need, or think you need, or maybe only want. The idea of these rooms and the actual living of your life are hard to separate from each other.  Your goals for yourself and your sense of failures with past goals are hard to separate, as are your mother’s heirlooms from your own childhood connection to them, and your childhood from your adulthood, and your self from your mother, and even your dog from the actual people in your life, or the people who were in your life but have slipped away, some to death, one to infidelity, many to neglect. The number and variety of sortings involved in understanding one’s desire for three new rooms—three new and empty spaces in which to make choices and create from scratch and find a blend for past, present, and future—make the idea of new rooms almost too much, too hard, not merited, impossible to achieve, a misbegotten endeavor toting the freight of misdirected, unfocused longing for things that have nothing at all to do with rooms.

Yet somehow, from somewhere comes the idea that it is no longer acceptable to dream about these rooms. Do it, your mind says. Take a stand. Claim your age—fifty-two years—and your place in the world and your own desires for yourself, even if you are coming at them in the most oblique way possible. If building three rooms is the only first step you can figure out, then just build them, says something inside you—possibly the still, calm voice of wisdom, or possibly not.

The desire for three rooms has its practical side to be sure. Your home of 18 years is, in fact, unusually small—660 square feet.  You would like a way into your house other than through the laundry room, with its recycling bins and trash can and bottles of detergent. You would like for more than three people to be able to sit down together at your home and eat, though when and how that would occur remains unclear.  Most particularly, you would like space for your books, yards and yards of shelves, and tall, stately filing cabinets that would rid you forever of the teetering stacks of novels, magazines, and file folders that occupy every available surface of every room and that make virtually everything you own impossible to access. And (because of a photograph you saw years ago in an advertisement that made your heart contract with longing, and which you cut out and kept in the hope of some future moment of bold action), you would like a room, just one, in which you can twirl around fully, with arms outstretched, and have no fear of hitting anything—after years of sidling past precariously balanced piles of things, at last, one room that feels more capacious than full.

But here’s the truth:  you believe that when you have these things you will become a writer.

There it is. When the clutter is tamed, you believe, when the books are alphabetized, when the stacks of papers are in labeled hanging file folders, and most especially when your mother’s things, including the great edifice of the Gracey heirlooms, have been responsibly handled, then a breed of clarity will emerge that will make writing as natural as breathing, and a lifetime of stored language will flow at last onto paper, in the comfort of your newly tidy study.

Closer to the center we come: along with your mother’s silver and antiques comes another legacy. Your mother wanted to be a writer, too. Her unpublished manuscripts and journals, her notes and file cards with curling edges arrest all forward motion; gazing from their shelves in the cluttered upstairs storage room, they cast a deep pall. Nothing can be achieved until they are ordered, honored, studied and understood, written about.  Custodian of two generations’ longing, you cannot fail both of you.

So, logical or not, you must build three rooms, so you can organize your and your mother’s things, so you can write.  That’s the way you believe it is.

The thing to understand about building rooms is this:  a person comes to your home to build them.

The person who comes to your home to discuss your three rooms has uncommonly blue eyes. He is ten years your junior. How to describe him? He is kind. There is a slight wariness about him that prevents him from smiling when he greets you. Though he is quick in conversation, he always thinks before he speaks. He moves not like a person but like a wild thing, lightly balanced on the earth, graceful. His intelligence waits quietly, not showy about announcing itself, yet brought to bear on everything he does. He relishes building, yet chafes at the repetitive toil of carpentry—but nonetheless, his whole expression of himself is put into every act of his work, a habit of mind that gives the simplest tasks an inherent integrity.

Of course, not all of this is apparent in that first meeting, which admits little to your brain except the uncommon eyes. The way in which his work and his self morph in and out of one another until they are nearly indistinguishable reveals itself only as the weeks and months glide by, months of construction throughout which the unassailable quality of solitude that is your life, the one unwavering given that defines you, begins to shift and change into something entirely different.

On the day the foundations are to be dug you are home to observe.  A backhoe plunges deep into the earth around your house over and over with an intensity that feels almost purely sexual to you. Why? you wonder.  Why, actually, does all of this, every bit of it, remind me of sex?

When you bought this unusually small and unassuming house 18 years ago, in your bucolic county that boasts not a single stoplight, you had not lived in anything other than a rented home since you were nine years old and had only once lived in any house for more than four years; your son, thirteen at the time, had never known the security of an owned home at all, despite your promise to yourself when he was born that he would not grow up moving constantly as you had. Your now ex-husband had wanted no part of the entanglement of owning real estate; so, when he declined to join in the effort, you bought the house yourself, on your teacher’s salary, a cinderblock box covered in yellow vinyl siding on five acres. When you went out to pay the local farmer who had bush-hogged down the overgrown land for you after the deal finally closed, he smiled down at you from his big tractor, pushed back his baseball cap, and shook his head. Then he said, “You’ve got yourself a pretty piece of ground,” and it was the proudest moment of your life.

Husband long gone, son off for school and then life, for the last ten years you have lived alone in this shelter, this almost unbelievable achievement of an owned home. The fact that it was so very small—frankly, just say it, too small, even for a single person living alone—hardly seemed relevant, any more than its various compromises and challenges did. Nonetheless, one day you woke up and looked around and asked your first, “What if…?” And from that seed grew, first, a modest bathroom overhaul; then a slate kitchen floor; then a great deal of paint everywhere and solid pine interior doors to replace the flimsy, hollow originals; and eventually, years down the path, the idea of three new rooms. The capstone, the dream of a lifetime: space for your books, space for Gracey heirlooms. Order. For writing.

Some days the builder of your rooms arrives in the morning before you leave for work, and occasionally he is still there when you come home. Periodic meetings are necessary to discuss materials, costs, and a multitude of minute details you could never have fathomed before witnessing the complexity of a construction process. You, he explains, are the contractor, and your new contractor’s notebook now goes with you everywhere—pasted onto the first page is your long-saved image of a woman twirling around unencumbered in a spacious bedroom—and grows fatter and fatter with notes from meetings, to-do lists, estimates, your research on windows and traditional stucco materials, and sources of reclaimed antique oak. The materials that arrive at the house by the truckload are all so raw:  framing lumber and thick, dense posts; sacks of cement mix; pipes and coiled metal; rebar and nails; cinderblock.

Slowly, defined spaces begin to emerge in the air around your existing house: first, platforms you can walk out onto; then the outlines of sides, of door and window openings, through which the contours of your land take on new aspects, framed through different portals.  Then the bones of a roof.

You learn a lot about a person by observing how he works. Each day you rush home from your job to see what new thing has been done and spend most of every evening walking around gazing at it all, trying to think through the myriad decisions that are governing its creation in the mind of someone you hardly know. All you handed him in that first meeting were your two little sketched diagrams, maps of the rooms you imagined. Watching those imaginings take shape under someone else’s hand is a process of unexpected intimacy.

His tools are laid out with precision before he leaves each day in preparation for the next day’s work. Most are simple objects of heft and dignity: pry bars, planers, chisels, sanders, mallets of various sizes, awls, drills, wrenches, screwdrivers. The holy of holies is a time-worn hammer, whose once-gray metal glows silver from within like a mythic sword. You photograph these objects. Eventually you begin to pick them up, testing their weight, marveling at their acquired smoothness.

In time, you cultivate opportunities to talk. In the steady current of this exchange of words, much is revealed: tragedies, betrayals, mistakes, doubts, dreams make their way to the surface from their deep lodgings. You discuss birds, and qualities of sound and light, and the nature of God, and life and death, and beauty, and listening. His smiling becomes less rare.

More than a year and a half into the project, the deck railing, the final step, is being notched together with hammer and chisel out of rough-sawn timbers, the uprights of which are six inches square. This technique, his suggestion, is a level of craftsmanship that takes uncountable hours, but for which you are being charged virtually nothing because you are long since out of money—yet no compromise of time or quality is ever discussed. Your heart yearns to believe that this final stage is being artificially protracted, but through long-practiced self-defense you tell yourself that is ridiculous, because who, after all, would be interested in spending any additional time around you?

Eventually, though, in late August, nearly two years after that first meeting, the work is in fact finished. The ceaseless hum that began some time ago in your body has now become the frantic beating of a bird’s wings against a cage or net; but to speak this is more than can be done. You thank him a thousand times. You watch him pack his things into his orderly silver truck, the ladders and planers and chisels, the hammer. You say goodbye, wave as he drives away, and go inside, to begin the work of remembering what it was you had wanted to do in these beautiful new rooms.

You organize and sort. You alphabetize and shelve. You discard and file. You make lists. You read and read and read. The fall and winter happen.  Every day you tell yourself to call him, and every day you fail.  At some point it begins to feel too late.

Your house is warmth and light. It is beauty and order, and the hard-won honoring of a deep and mysterious drive, and a tentative step towards the healing of a variety of wounds. But as the months pass, it is not a place of writing.

A cold weight of fear, dense and heavy, settles in your center.  It cannot even be looked at, because to look at it could be to admit the chance that not just your three new rooms, but your entire life, has involved miscalculations of massive proportion.

Eventually spring arrives, and one Sunday in early March, you take your dog for a walk on a backroad you love, which also happens to be the road on which you were first introduced, years ago, to the blue-eyed builder of your rooms, the only time you had met him before the day he came to your home to bid your job. You pause at the spot on the road where you met, wondering if it is only a trick of memory leading you to believe that you felt a tug even then, a whisper of foresight.

Suddenly, from nowhere, a blue heron is above you, flapping slowly and majestically in its awkward languid way. It passes directly over you, then shifts and floats away.

And somehow, from this encounter, a piece of seemingly unrelated knowledge comes to you with clarity:  after all these months, on this day you will see him. In fact, chimes in the still, calm voice of wisdom, in a coda to the heron’s revelation: he is on his way to your house right now.

You cut your walk short, hurry your dog to the car, drive home, change your shirt, and have barely seated yourself on your beautifully-chiseled deck to wait when you hear wheels on gravel. You walk out to the porch, and he drives up. He smiles, and you smile, and he says he was just passing by.  And you say a heron told you he was coming.  He accepts this without comment. You embrace for the first time. You go inside together, and shut the door.
 

Scribbly

A Gentle Writing Program

by Kim Duke

Imagine calling yourself a writer. Now it's time to make it real. Let Scribbly help you become the writer you've always wanted to be...without the pressure. My name is Kim Duke and I’m a full-time writer, Amazon best-selling author and my work has been featured on NBC News, the Globe and Mail and other international media. My mission is simple. To get more women writing with intention, fun and freedom! My gentle writing program is mailed to your home every 30 days. Each Scribbly is loaded with quirky writing tips, prompts and examples. My team and I devote over 100 hours into each issue. Gorgeous illustrations, research, art, science and writing that reach out from the pages to inspire you. I can't wait for you to see your Scribbly! Scribbly is a gentle writing program that encourages your creativity and gets you writing in five minutes. If you want to explore creative nonfiction writing (without pressure) - you'll love Scribbly! The best part? When you're a Scribbly member, you get a chance to submit your writing for publication in Scribbly. Hooray for Snail Mail! More about the Scribbly Program can be found at www.kimdukewrites.com/Scribbly

Find this and more in ArtsMart