A Room of One's Own

Well, my room is indeed a sanctuary for me, but I cannot call it my own.  We often gather there for family prayer or scripture study.   The kids hunt me down and find me there.  But I have wanted a place of my very own since I first read Virginia Woolf's essay, A Room of One's Own back in college.  It's not that I'm a feminist or that I mind sharing everything I have, or am not willing to, but before I am a wife and a mother, I have to exist and be comfortable with myself.  I need to make sense of what is around me. That need is fulfilled in writing and reading, recording thoughts and experiences.  In order to do so, I must have a place that is a retreat for me alone where I can "illumine {my} own soul with its profundities and its shallows, and its vanities and its generosities, and say what [my] beauty means to [me] or [my] plainness, and what is [my] relation to the ever changing and turning world . . ."  When I am at my desk thinking or writing, I am clarifying, understanding and growing or merely recording "All these infinitely obscure" but oh so profound "lives." So, I have improvised a little and now have a desk of my own; and it rolls down and locks.  Everything on my desk or around it has specific significance to me and I can as Virginia Woolf asks, "live in the presence of reality . . . to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us."  I guess with all my journals and notebooks, that is what I hope to accomplish someday.

(The watercolor that is hard to see clearly on the wall was painted by my grandfather.  And the candlelit lamp is a unique gift Joseph brought to me from Chicago very early on in our marriage.)

Another view of my room.  I recently acquired this ladder to hang shawls and scarfs on.  They are too beautiful to leave in a drawer.  There are shawls from Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia and India on that rack.  I wear them all too, occasionally.  By the way,  I didn't pick the lime green curtains in my room.  Those came with the house and there is no point spending money to change them.  I'm used to them now and so I guess they don't look so bad anymore.