An Open Letter to My Office in My Soon to Be House…

Visualizing tonight, because I believe it helps to speed the process along. I think I'm looking forward to this space most of all. In my office, the walls are a dark rosy-pink…I’m not sure why, but I think it has something to do with the quilt I bought for my dorm in my freshman year in college. Plus, it matches Lisa’s fainting couch. (I’m sure I’ve told you the story behind Lisa’s fainting couch. If I haven’t, I should. We’ve got a history together.)

In my Office there’s a tin-topped table from the 1940’s that serves as my desk. It has been in my kitchen for the past five years, ever since I got it from my mother in law…it had been her mother’s, and now it is mine. I love it because…something like that is a tie between people. (And because I love my mother in law.) You sit at a kitchen table and have a cup of tea. You write a love letter there. You receive news – joyful and heartbreaking but important. I have, and at least two generations before me have, too. And, my grandmother had a table just like this one, where she laughed with Aunt Liz and twisted a hanky in her hands with worry and wrote recipes. I have some of those recipes still.

You know…that had been my original plan for my book about my families. It would be objects that would jump you from one woman’s story to another, weaving them all together. A beaded purse, an afghan, a tea pot…I feel like I have blogged all of this before. I shouldn’t give any more away.

I might have found my beginning, my launching point, but to do it, to start it, I need my table back. I need to be sitting in my pink office, with my feet on the fainting couch, my cup of tea on my table beside me.

I feel the need to have a space like this, a space to decorate and fill with some things that ground and support me. My pictures, my scrapbooks, my silly little treasures from my childhood, flowers and pillows and books books books books. And not to be selfish or exclusive of my family, because they’re all parts of me, too, and welcomed in my Office. But everyone will have that, for themselves. Their own corner of the sky. They won’t feel guilty about it, and I shouldn’t either.

So weird that I do, though. But that's a topic for another day.

So, in my new office, I will have my own version of the Dewy Decimal System. It’ll be the Kelly Chronicles Decimal System. Categories will include: "The Manuals" – containing the books that made me me. You know the ones. And there will be ones I bought because they had an intruiging cover but haven’t gotten to yet; that will be the "Friends I Haven’t Met Yet" category. Then there are the ones that I really should have read by now – Jane Eyre and Swann’s Way and Atlas Shrugged and Ted Kennedy’s book and Pride and Prejudice. (I always think I read that, and then realize that it was just repeated readings of Sense and Sensibility. Or maybe it was the movie. Anyhooo…)

In this office will be a very organized scrapbook closet, so things could be made a moment’s notice. The girls’ computer and TV will be in there too, so they will feel a part of it and welcome there when they need mothering. Their bedrooms will be for when they need privacy. I hope to help them find the balance of that. I hope I will learn to be better able to find the balance of that. Sometimes I think this little office, this Room of My Own will be a place to help me on that path. There will be many other spaces that we will share as a family together, but those are also topics for another day.

My psychic friend Carole once led me on a visualization for finding my Sanctuary. It was very cool, and in my vision I saw a room just like this one that I am imagining now, creating now, books and pillows and teacups, and now I’m making it happen. I love that I can do that. I am so eager to do that.

So, I want this house for a whole bunch of reasons, and this is the one I wanted to write about tonight. Patrick is out at Guys’ Night, which evidently actually consists of barbeque, scotch, and Lord of the Rings. And probably some bacon in there somewhere. I am watching Twilight like a brooding seventh grader, eating Twizzlers and waxing poetical about pillows, tappity tapping on my laptop, wondering if I am writing a journal entry or a blog.