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MY GOOD WRITING ROOM

img_2099“At the end of the day, it isn’t where I came from. Maybe home is somewhere I’m going and never have been before.”  Warsan Shire

I was diagnosed with interstitual lung disease in 1999. It wasn’t until 2008, however, that the most dramatic adjustments to my manner of living were required. What follows was written in April of that year. It was originally published in the now defunct California Woman.

It’s a good writing room, this room into which I have downsized to accommodate my disabled body. The room is big enough for comfort and small enough to be easy – and quick – to clean.  Perfect!  It’s the master suite in a sprawl of a condo on the gentle sweep of a tree-lined street in Menlo Park, California, a long way from home . . .

That march of trees down the drive, by the way – the oak and maple and campertown elm – is important. I’m enamoured of trees. Their proximity influenced my decision to rent.

“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.” ― Hermann Hesse, Trees: Reflections and Poems

img_2102-2This place has a solid, foursquare feel to it. There are no stairs inside the condo and no stairs to reach it, and this is an added attraction. The colors are soft and peaceful: creams, peaches and pistachios, maroons and deep green. My large and cherished statue of Quan Yin and two tall plants add grace to one corner. My pie crust table with a small forest of variegated greenery sits in the other. There’s a maple secretary, which is perfect for my laptop and family photographs, a shrine (or so my world-class daughter-in-law says) to those who sit at the center of my heart. I have tossed a white cloth of Brandenburg lace over my round bedside table. My stereo lives on top of the old oak dresser. There are two mismatched-bookcases, much valued by me. They are part of our family history.

Once, forty-some years ago and 3,000 miles away, I was addicted to Georgette Heyer‘s Regency romances. I think if she would have written about this room with its fine, healthy plants, good books, good music, and hodgepodge of furniture, she might have described it as “shabby genteel”. That’s okay by me. I’ve got no one to impress and it serves my body, my spirit and my latter-day ambitions well.

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I decided on a double-bed. It offers ample enough room to lay out books, pens and colored pencils, paper and even my laptop. My darling landlady’s two yellow-eyed black cats are also ample and like to hop on the bed for a visit. Executives both, they supervise and comment petulantly when I ignore their direction. I’ve had many kitty companions. My last was Pywacket. I’ve learned over time that cats, like moonlight, inspire the muse. They are very welcome in here.

There’s a washer and dryer inside the condo, so I don’t have to try to lug laundry to a garage or laundry room and back. The kitchen isn’t quite as bright as I’d like, but it’s clean – scrupulous – in granite and stainless steel. I enjoy cooking almost as much as writing. It’s an endeavor that feeds my soul as well as my body, though I admit I miss having the energy and opportunity to cook for others.

I’m all moved in and settled. If you peeked in at me, you’d think me a housefrau, not a bad thing, running the laundry while preparing dinner: creamy yogurt, enchanted broccoli with olive oil, garlic, and lemon, and cheery orange carrot-coins with fried onions and dill. I prepared a risotto with rose brown rice, shallots, and shiitake mushrooms. Later, a mug of  honeyed Citrus Chamomile for a restful night of writing and sleep.

From this stillness, this cleanliness, this simplicity, I will write, cook and love my people with reckless abandon. For the moment, there is safe harbor. Life is good and tomorrow is a new day.

© 2008 Jamie Dedes

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THE SCENT OF MA’AMOUL, a poem

Lebanese shortbread cookies stuffed with figs, dates or walnuts (the original fig newton???)
Lebanese shortbread cookies stuffed with figs, dates or walnuts (the original Fig Newton???)

The year we shaped our lives in the redwood forest,
you brought a wounded salamander inside to heal.
We gathered woodsy things, thistles and pinecones.
We made rose-hip syrup, dried the last of the herbs.
I decorated the cabin in an ensemble of earth tones,
a spicy blend to match the fires you built in the hearth
and the scent of the East in the ma’amoul baking. Our
seasonal hibernation was swathed in sweets and books.
Our winter warmed on the gold-dust of our dreams.

© 2016, poem, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved; photograph, mamoul: biscotti libanesi, by fugzu under CC BY 2.0 license

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THAT WHITE WATCHUNG HOME, a poem … and your Wednesday writing prompt

img_1167I wonder if that old Watchung home still stands
or has it been demolished by developers building
rows on rows of barracks-like housing where
big maples used to rise to line the roadway
·
Driving up to that sprawling place, soundly built
and well-loved, a kaleidoscope of colors greeted us –
The burnished bronze of our uncle’s skin and the
brown-black of his doe eyes and dense curly hair
The azure sky and snowy clouds tumbling down to
top the perfect juicy purple of ripe Italian plums
and the brisk reds of beefsteak and plum tomatoes
The true-green of the too-long grass feathering the
rich chocolaty shades of the well-mulched earth
·
That antique home was pristine white with green trim
and such a busy, welcoming, wrap-around porch,
often with bushels of fruit and vegetables standing
in the company of freshly cut flowers piled and tossed
All waiting . . . for what and for whom?
The airy rooms were waiting too with windows
and doors thrown open to children like me breezing
in from the The City with our pallid skin and eyes
burning to see our uncle and some untouched nature
·
Well-worn carpets, Persian and Arabian, brushed bare feet
as searching room-to-room for hidden treasures and history
I marveled at the accoutrements of other decades –
the water pump, the dumb-waiter, the pull-chain water closet
Each room was a marvel of furnishings, fine wood and hand-turned
Drawers lined with newspapers, yellow and dissolving with age,
advertising corsets, questionable cures, and other ephemera of this
same place in times mostly forgotten except for stale news
telling its stories to the silence in chests mostly empty and untouched
The mammoth tables in the large white high-ceilinged kitchen and
the stately dining room with its chandelier and heavy drapes spoke of
more formal multi-generational dinners before these days of greater
mobility and the tech distractions of i-This and smart-That

The peaceable, sturdy safe-haven of that white Watchung home
matched the steady embrace of its woods and orchards
where a child like me could lie on the hardy ground,
sun blinding bright, browning spindly arms and legs, small body
soaking in rich damp earth, mind yawning, stretching, awakening
Imagination rising in mists of violet-grey shot with silver stories
and flaxen poems finding their way into the pages of a notebook
Such plum-sweet visions set free by that mystical place –
I wonder if it still stands in Watchung, if it remembers me
And how I loved it – I still do

WRITING PROMPT

I think a lot about houses and housing these days. Here in Silicon Valley there’s a critical shortage of housing in general and especially of affordable housing. I know several families who lost their homes when the housing bubble burst in the later part of the last decade. I have a neighbor who ended up on the street for two years . There are too many folks who make their way by couch-surfing or living out of their cars or trucks. We read in the papers about homeless children here and abroad and think and pray and do what we can for all those people sleeping in the rough, escaping violence in their homelands. I’ve always appreciated our homes, never anything fancy but definitely safe, clean and functional, and I remember warmly the homes and hospitality of friends and relatives with whom I stayed at different times when I was a child.

I’m sure you too have memories of the houses or apartments in which you grew-up or stayed when you were young. Maybe those memories are good. Maybe not. Either way, they probably remain vivid in your mind. Perhaps there was one thing – like the tree in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – that had special meaning or gave you hope. Outside the complex where my mother lived there were two berry trees, Mulberry perhaps, that I thought of as guardians of the building.

Write a poem or creative nonfiction piece about the house or apartment that most stands out in your memories of childhood and tell us what it meant to you, what was special or loathsome, what dreams you may have nurtured there, or how it might have fixed your vision of the home you’d have as an adult. Take your time and enjoy the process.

© 2016, words and photograph, Jamie Dedes, All rights reserved