(Hear Ms. Chessman read from The Beauty of Ordinary Things at the special launch celebration at Books Inc Palo Alto this Tuesday, Nov. 12th)
My
favorite space for writing is this one – our dining room. I love it because it’s light and airy, has
colorful art, and looks out on our small, green Palo Alto garden. I sit facing the windows and French doors, so
that I can contemplate our postage stamp of a lawn, and the three gigantic
redwoods in our neighbor’s yard, just past the high fence. As December
approaches, our camellia buds are almost ready to pop, and I can already
picture their blooms, reddish-pink and as big as your hand. Birds come to the garden, especially in the
early morning. People laugh or talk as
they bicycle along our street in front – a biking boulevard. The kitchen is a few steps away, to my
happiness and temptation.
I write
best here when the house is quiet. Right
now I’m able to write this, in fact, because the members of my household are
still asleep, or away, aside from my daughter’s cat Eliot – our house guest for
the week – who is, like all creatures, a great inspiration and comfort, and infinite
source of amusement. It’s appealing, to
write in a house filled with cats and dreamers.
Often,
if the house is too noisy or distracting, I choose a quieter space like a
bedroom, where I can close the door. I
am a bit Whitmanian in my love of open spaces, though (“Unscrew the locks from
the doors! Unscrew the doors themselves
from their jambs!”) – or maybe it’s just that I like to be part of a household,
with its goings on. For most of my
married life, I’ve never had a room all my own, and although sometimes the idea
appeals to me, it also makes me a little itchy.
The
truth is, I am conflicted. I want peace
and quiet, and yet I also want the presence of other people – people I love –
around me. I have always liked to be in
the midst of activity, light and air, color and noise, fragrances, shouts, cats
jumping, dogs thumping, children playing.
I imagine that these ordinary (and of course extraordinary) things pour
straight into my writing and help it fill up with freshness and liveliness.
My son
is awake now, making coffee, and Eliot is meowing at him. He’s telling me about a lucid dream he just
had. The light has come almost all the
way into the dining room, making slanted bright patterns on the white
walls. I’ve covered the art on that side
with a baby quilt, a pillowcase, and a dish towel, to protect it from the
intensity of a California sun. A pile of
newspapers sits on a chair. The wooden
book-holding angel, given to me by a wonderful children’s book writer many
years ago, is still flying on her perch.
The clock with the dove on top is still ticking: 10:50 a.m. now. My daughter just called from Connecticut,
where she’s travelling with her husband, and I hope to talk to my son in
Atlanta today too, and to my husband, who’s also in Connecticut, for a
conference on the “Americas.” I’m eager
to come back to the plays of Pinter and the poems of Wendell Berry. I will try to resist opening the
cellophane-wrapped cornmeal cookies I bought for a neighbor. The Italian photograph still holds the young
boy, walking through a village, black-clothed women around him. My son-in-law’s whimsical self-portrait sits
in its small frame, reminding me of the cartoons he creates. The saltshaker in the form of a rock is a few
inches from the angel. A plate of
satsumas and lemons is in front of me, on the glass table, between my
grandmother’s silver candlesticks.
Soon I
will look at my to-do list. I will do
errands. I’ll go on a walk with a
friend. My son will start singing in our
garage room, now a music studio. Before
I get up from my laptop, though, the air is filled with a bunch of raucous
birds. Heading south, they must be. Their shadows wing like mad through the room. –Harriet Scott Chessman
