a home of one's own

It’s not a big house—the one I arrived at yesterday, where I will stay for the next month and write. It’s not big but it feels plentiful—with options and variety forgotten by this long-time one-bedroom-apartment-dweller. When you come through the front door, you find yourself standing in a large, open-ended living room, with dining room and kitchen spaces at one end. To the left there is a hallway off of which lie two bedrooms and a study, two bathrooms, and a deep open alcove that begs for an armchair and a large desert plant with which to bask under the skylight. There are, in fact, skylights everywhere, giving the home an airy feel; and it turns out that there are also nooks scattered throughout. Off the living room, tucked between the laundry room and kitchen, there is a room just big enough for two chairs and a tv beside a shelf of cookbooks. Behind the back wall of the living room, there proves to be on one side a breakfast nook, drenched in daylight from the pebble-filled back “yard” (hello, arid climate), and on the other an open stairwell, into which light pours from above, beckoning you up the carpeted steps. Here perches the one second-floor room of the house, with white walls and windows on every side, so that I can write in the warm glow of a winter sun and facing clay-tile rooftops, adobe facades, the evergreen branches of pines amidst the increasingly barren boughs of one set of deciduous trees side by side with the lush, yellow-leaved tops of others—and above and beyond all this stretches the broad, undulating rock wall that is Sandia Crest.

I came to Albuquerque to work on my writing, to create a space and time outside of my daily life in which to focus deeply on my creativity. Less than 24 hours into my stay, I can already see that I’m going to also be treated to something else soul-essential while I’m here. I’m going to remember what it is like to live in a house, with hallways and outdoor spaces and options for my habitation of it. This room I will use for writing—and maybe morning stretches in the sun. In the living room I will nestle into the comfy couch or armchairs and read books and New Yorkers, catch up on tv, perhaps write as well. If I yearn for more sun during those activities, I will sit in the breakfast nook, by the large sliding glass doors that let in so much light. I might write in the study at the front of the house, maybe even atop the guest room sofa. If I yearn for more comfort, I will go to my bedroom, with its downy-soft bed—and which has a hallway inside it! When I want to feel a sense of movement I will walk up and down the two hallways. It’s a silly thing to have missed immensely but I’ve been craving a hallway for six years now—the whole time I’ve been living alone. It’s probably the same craving that made me antsy to drive here—to just get in the car and go. It’s a little do to with momentum, a little to do with transition, a little to do with having options. It’s a lot to do with a sense of freedom—with having enough space to be all parts of me.