House series #10: A Loft

              A master in the use of space, my son designed a loft for me by extending the ceiling of the storage closet over the entryway. The roof peaks four and a half feet above that floor.

            Unfortunately, the county doesn’t like lofts and says so in its building code, and it especially doesn’t like ladders, so there was a question both of what I would do with the space and of how I would access it.

            Nothing in the building code says I can’t walk up a set of shelves in my house if I am so simian, so when Richard built shelves at the writing-nook corner of the closet, he gave them some decorative holes, which I have found very useful when I climb my shelves to get to the loft. There is no ladder in my house, Mr. Inspector, just a set of shelves.

            I envisioned the loft as a cozy, secretive space that my granddaughter might want to sleep in when she came to visit. After I moved into the house, I slept there a few nights. It was fine, but the precipitous slant of the ceiling meant I had to knee-crawl everywhere, which, even after I carpeted the floor, was not very comfortable. So the loft turned out to be not a spare bedroom but a spill-over library.

            Instead of getting rid of books that wouldn’t fit in my library, I asked Richard to build shelves across the entire back wall of the loft. There I put files of tax-relevant materials, children’s books, photo albums, years of journals, and history, biography, and other nonfiction books, including the two or three science books in my humanities-heavy library. Two antique wooden milk boxes store CDs, DVDs, and other old-fashioned media. A long tin box from my mother’s house holds my collection of post cards.

            Holding up the ceiling at the edge of the loft is a beautiful, peeled fir pole, unusually round and uniform. Richard had been saving it for years, but he gave it to me for that spot in the house. On my moving-in day Christopher (who had advised on the house design; see post on February 25, 2016) suggested I attach some manzanita limbs to that pole and hang from them two metal sculptures Ela had made when he was in college. 

            I don’t really do things in the loft, but I go up there from time to time to get something I need. I’ve gotten pretty good at climbing the shelves and pulling myself onto the floor of the loft. Sometimes I spread photo albums on the floor, looking for particular pictures. Sometimes I pull out old journals and sit on the floor, searching through them for a particular memory or piece of writing. Sometimes I need to put away some post cards or look for a CD. So I climb the shelves into the loft, and usually, when I’m there, I lose myself for an hour or so in this other special place in my house.

A Pause: At the Beautiful Oregon Coast

            When we think we’ve done grand things, when we think our lives are important, when we feel ourselves powerful and mighty, we need to sit by the ocean for a while and feel ourselves in our place. 

The gray-green water stretching to the horizon (and, we know, even beyond) casts a spell of infinity, as do the ceaselessly pounding, splashing, foaming waves, barely audible to the one small woman on a bench on a cliff so far above the ocean.

            Earlier I had slip-slid down a long, steep, deeply sandy bank to a pocket beach bound on both ends by impassable mounds of rocks. From one end of the beach to the other, stacked against the uphill cliff, stretched a wide swath of tangled, sun-bleached driftwood (and I remembered all the downed trees on the ski trails this winter). 

The surf surged onto the beach, dragging loose rocks back with it, creating one of the most beautiful sounds in the world: the gurgling laughter of small rocks as the ocean pulls them into its depths only to have them dash back up on the beach with the next incoming wave so they can be pulled into the water again, like children who run again and again from the bottom of the slide to its steps just so they can have the joy of sliding down again, chattering and laughing, chuckling and giggling.

            In case one reasserts one’s sense of importance upon leaving the coast, a hike through the redwoods will once again bring one down to size. The redwood trees, centuries and even millennia old, just magnificently are. Their beingness dominates, their cynn, the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon concept of the way of being that each individual inherits according to the kind of thing (the species) to which it is born. The Anglo-Saxon poet-monk would rhapsodize about the powerful feorh, or spirit, of the redwoods. Walking among them, even one small twenty-first-century woman feels that feorh, and words like “cathedral,” “divinity,” “sacred” rise in her mind. Her feorh instinctively adjusts to that of the trees. The age of an individual tree staggers the imagination; its height goes beyond sight, its girth beyond comprehension. There may be small creatures here, too – bugs and worms, rhododendrons and red sorrel – but only dinosaurs could compete for space and attention among the coastal redwoods. The redwoods carry with grace the distinction, of which they do not deign to be proud, of being the tallest trees in the world. They simply speak for existence, theirs, yours, mine – that of all of us who gratefully share the space of this earth with them.

House Series #9 – The Library

            I am one of those people Alan Powers describes in Living with Books who, “in case of sudden nocturnal literary deprivation,” go to bed with books immediately available. Therefore, my bedroom flows borderless into my library. 

            I had planned floor-to-ceiling bookshelves in the library, but the cedar wainscoting is so beautiful my builder couldn’t bear to cover it, so I sacrificed book space for wall space, and Richard built half-height shelves. Because the bookcase on the west wall would be at the top of the stairs and therefore the point to which the railing would draw the eye when one entered the house, I told Richard to do something creative there. I gave him Living with Books for inspiration and left the details up to him.

            What he gave me was a bookshelf that featured, in its center, a ceramic mask that once belonged to my mother. The shelves end in curved cuts, like syncopated beats. Highly polished, deep red, square manzanita posts hold up the shelves. 

            I would like to have put my most beloved books – English and American literature – in that beautiful bookcase, but they are such a motley collection! Adam Bede's spine is torn, Ulysses's jacket has a rip in it, David Copperfield is altogether spineless, and so many Faulkner novels are missing spines and covers, their pages held together with rubber bands, that the whole clan from Yaknapatawpha County (even they) would be ashamed. I couldn’t bring myself to put such unsightly books on such beautiful shelves.

            So “most aesthetic collections,” not "most beloved literature," became the criterion. The annual Best American Essays – all the same size, each a different color, from the moss green 1988 edition to the baby blue 2015 edition, all years inclusive – sit prettily on the bottom shelf. John McPhee cozies up next to them, a respectable clan with only two or three unsightly relatives included that couldn’t be omitted from the family reunion

            Rising above McPhee is Nabokov, another author whose complete works I own. Above Nabokov is Shakespeare, who generously shares his shelf with the work of other playwrights, the six volumes of my Norton Anthology of English Literature (heavily annotated for teaching), and a sizable collection of food writing. On top of the bookcase a fine leather-bound edition of Moby Dick keeps strange company with T. Coraghessan Boyle, Alice Walker, and Doris Lessing, though Ahab’s Wife sits suitably alongside it. The two bookends that hold that line of books upright – statues of a boy stretching to reach the top of a high stack of books – came from the living room of my childhood home.

            On the south-wall shelves I paid attention only to logical order. American literature flows left to right from Nathaniel Hawthorne through to Vonnegut and Pynchon (Faulkner in a bookcase on the other side of the window), while on the shelf below, English literature keeps pace through the centuries: Defoe, Austen, Hardy, Bronte, and now let us linger over the incomparable George Eliot before going on to Dickens, Woolf, and Joyce. The contemporary novelists, British and American, that wouldn't fit on those shelves have leapt the divide to reside above the food literature on the west-wall shelves. The arrangement isn’t logical, but I know where things are.

           Poetry is in my writing nook, but art books have a shelf here, and nature books two shelves. Adjacent to these books France rubs elbows with Italy; Russia with Germany, Chile with Scandinavia, Japan with China, all in fiction. Pamuk represents Turkey, Mahfouz Egypt, and Saramago Portugal. The tongues have mostly turned English, but some French, Latin, and Swedish books speak in their original languages. I seldom read anything in a foreign language any more, but I like looking at the books and remembering when I could. Below the mythology and linguistics books and fun books about words on the next shelf are my sister Laura’s fifteen books and some large books I couldn’t categorize: The Literary Cat, a Time-Life book on wilderness, a picture book of Göteborg. 

              Arrangement of books is important in a library, but, as Powers says, "careful consideration needs to be given to the relationship between the position in which the reader is to sit and the rest of the room.” In my library this consideration resulted in a Victorian fainting couch under the south-facing window, perfect for reading, taking notes, day-dreaming, or falling asleep with a book.

            In Living with Books Alan Powers says that reading the titles of books in a home allows a person “to make a quick assessment of the character of the occupant.” In this account of my library I have named many titles and authors (though only a small portion of the whole), allowing you to make that quick assessment. Or maybe you have experienced a sense of kinship, as I do when I see someone reading a book I have enjoyed: “Oh, I’ve read that book. It’s wonderful!” 

            You are always welcome in my library.

House Series #8: The Sewing Room

            I love fabrics – their colors, textures, and patterns, the way they cling or wrap, the way they fold, sway, or layer. It’s hard to resist buying a beautiful fabric, even if I don’t know what to do with it. Consequently, I have always had shelves and drawers of fabrics available for the day I wake up with a hankering to sew. Then I drag them all out and spread them on the floor or the couch, laying a pattern for a skirt with one, a different pattern over another, matching fabrics and patterns, and, usually, choosing both for the next project. 

Sometimes, I put everything away without having decided a thing. I could spend hours pulling out my fabrics, fluffing them out, matching fabrics and relishing their colors and textures and happily enveloping myself in my beautiful fabrics.

            In my old house it was tedious having to put my sewing away at the end of the day because I had to make dinner in the same room or because guests were coming or because I was out of time that day for that project. So, in designing my new house, I asked for a sewing room, a room where, when it was time for dinner, I could leave everything piled on the floor, where if visitors came, I could just close the door on the mess. The sewing machine could stay out. I could set up the ironing board in that room and leave it up. I wanted a room where I could sew and stop sewing and then start again. 

 

            And that’s what I got. The sewing room is across the main room from the writing nook. In addition to the two chests of drawers and two trunks that hold fabrics, it contains baskets and bags of yarns for knitting projects. My tapestry loom is on one wall, cards for card weaving in a bag under it, crafts books and sewing patterns in the book case with the sewing box my father made on the top shelf.

 The sewing machine sits on a favorite oak desk under the south-facing window. On the wall are paintings by friends and family members and an embroidery I did for my mother years ago. Dresses yet to be mended hang on a rack; the not-quite-finished quilt stays next to the sewing machine.

            One of the rules I discovered for one-room-cabin living in my old house was that everything had to serve a dual purpose or more. That principle holds for my sewing room now, as it doubles as a guest room. Imagine! The luxury of giving my guests a room of their own. The futon couch folds down for a bed, and guests can close the door for their privacy.

            The best thing about the sewing room, though, is not that it keeps my sewing projects contained or that it can sleep two guests but that it has a secret tunnel. A short door on one wall opens into a cabinet where I store blankets and cushions. The same cabinet is accessible from the other side, through a door under the stairs. When my granddaughter comes to visit, I take out all the blankets and cushions, leaving the tunnel empty. As soon as she gets here, she goes straight to the tunnel door. She crawls in and closes the door behind her. “Where am I, Amma-Dee? Try to find me!” The tunnel in the sewing room is my granddaughter’s favorite room in the house.

House Series #7: Writing Nook

            Virginia Woolf said that a woman who aspired to be a writer needed a room of her own. Of course, my whole house is a room of my own, but what Virginia Woolf meant was a room in which a woman could write from her deepest center. In my old house the living room was the kitchen was the writing space. When Ela asked what I wanted in the design of my new house, I specified a room dedicated to writing, the sort of cozy, intimate space I like best.

            Ela complied, giving me an eight-foot-square writing nook, symmetrical to the entranceway on the other side of the storage closet along the east wall. A set of narrow, tall shelves cuts off the square corner of that wall, angling into the nook, both inviting one inside and demarcating the space. Across from the angled tall shelves is a two-drawer wooden file cabinet with, on top, a photo album of my friend who died last year and a photo board of pictures of my granddaughter.

 A large window on the east side looks into the woods, and a double window on the south side looks onto the garden, the apple tree, the pond, and Humpy Mountain. On the opposite wall to the south window, i.e., on the back side of the storage closet, is a set of bookshelves that hold: two shelves of the medieval books I was most fond of while I was writing my dissertation; two shelves of poetry books; my Tarot cards from the hippy years; hiking books and maps; reference books; and a shelf of folders of current projects. 

On the walls of the nook are a small wooden cabinet my father made for my mother for their first wedding anniversary: 

an embroidery I did years ago (Led Zeppelin: “Sing hard for the sunshine/Pray hard for the rain/Show your love for the lady in Nature/And she will come back again”); 

a calligraphy by my sister of a poem, titled “Advice,” that Ela gave me for Christmas years ago (“Live on a mountain. Build your own house. Have a proliferation of creative ideas …”); an art piece by a friend of Ela’s from college; a cut-out wall sculpture Ela made;

and a poster of Lelavision, my son and daughter-in-law’s performance troupe. On the windowsill are a stained glass piece from a student, a pencil holder I had on my desk as a child (an Indian’s face, with pencils sticking out of the head like feathers in a headdress), a pair of binoculars, some rocks, and a nameplate –­ Dr. Diana Coogle – that my former college roommate sent me after I earned my Ph.D.

            The placement of the desk caused a bit of a tussle between Ela and me. I wanted the desk under the south windows so I could look at Humpy as I wrote. Ela said that would destroy the concept of a nook and make the space just an extension of the living room’s south-facing wall. Architecturally, the desk should go under the east window. The view into the woods, he assured me, was also a good one.

            I didn’t dispute that, but it’s Humpy that is my inspiration. It’s Humpy I wanted to look at during those long pondering moments when I waited for the words to come. I did see Ela’s point about the orientation of the nook, but the inspiration wasn’t the same if I had to turn my head and lean slightly back in order to see Humpy. I shouldn’t have to make an effort. The view should just be there when I looked up.

            My solution was to put the desk under the east window, then have my builder, Richard, build a fold-down shelf just big enough for my computer under the south window. In my swivel chair, I can face the mountain to do my writing, then swivel to the desk where I’ve set books and papers. I can move the computer from shelf to desk as the light demands. My printer and my phone are on the desk. The orientation of the nook is to the east, but to see Humpy when I write, all I have to do is lift my head. Inspiration is abundant. I spend a lot of time in my writing nook, surrounded by things that remind me of people I love, looking onto a landscape I love. In my writing nook writing is a joyful occupation.

House series #6 – The Awesome Railing

    Christopher was right when he said the stairs would dominate the house. The first thing you see when you walk into the house is the stairs or, more accurately, their railing. 

 You probably gasp. You walk into the room as under a spell, your eyes on the railing. The railing is the artistic center, the eye-catching wonder, the totally awesome focal point of my house.

    It was my son who made the railing. He is a welder and a designer and has built railings for high-end houses owned by wealthy people with an eye for art. I am not wealthy, but I have an Ela Lamblin railing in my house. I am so lucky.
    One handicap, it would seem, was that Ela lives in Washington. He would have to build the nine panels of the railing there and bring them here to install them. I would have to take very careful measurements to make sure they would fit. I did the best I could and hoped I had measured accurately. We talked on the phone about designs. We emailed ideas back and forth. Ela suggested a nature theme. He sent me sketches.

I didn’t know how he was going to transfer those lines into steel, but I was captivated by the abstract depictions of elements I love: water, mountains, rain. I trusted he would know how to turn idea into fact.
    In mid-August Ela drove to the Applegate with a van full of steel panels and his welding equipment. He arrived at my house one morning, unloaded his welder, set it up in my yard, pulled the panels from the van, and went to work.

    He gave me the job of scrubbing the welds of each panel with a wire brush. Richard, my builder, came to help with the installation. He and Ela measured, hauled panels into place, drilled, and screwed. Incredibly, everything fit, almost to a T. (I love the small, indistinct discrepancy, of less than an inch on only one panel, to prove the difficulty of the task.)     

    One by one, the panels went up. By the end of the day, everything was finished. Ela gave me a hug, loaded his welder into the van, and drove back to Washington.
    Now I have the most beautiful railing imaginable. Circles and spirals and whirly lines – a dozen ways to depict rain and clouds, trees and water, snow on mountains. Each panel evokes a different image: mountains and atmospheric swirls with a few colored glass balls suspended among them (later additions); drops of water making concentric circles in a pond; parallel lines of wind-blown rain from semi-circular clouds; swirls of clouds with bubbles of rain; a gorgeous tree with colored glass-bottle-bottom fruits; two sunbursts (or clouds or snow or atmospheric movements) above a little house with the exact silhouette of the house I live in; horizontal wavelets like fish or creek-bed currents or leaves flowing downstream (or –?); two mountain peaks, streaked with snow, beamed on by a sun (or is it the moon?) with rays of more glass bottle bottoms; a sun’s long rays streaming onto mountain peaks far below; and – is this my favorite? – long lines of steel, each ending in a rounded raindrop, raining between sharp mountain peaks below and fluffy curves of clouds above. No, the tree is my favorite. No, it’s the house. No, pond. No, I can’t tell. One day it’s one, one day another.
    I am so lucky to have this beautiful piece of art as the centerpiece of my house. I am so lucky to have a son both so generous and so talented. Every day I wake up full of gratitude.

An Interruption to the Series about My House To Tell about Skiing Last Weekend.

            The wind was blowing hard from a dark sky when Mike and I drove into the back parking lot of Mt. Ashland. An inch or two of new snow gentled an ice-hard base. We started skiing down the lower road, where there was less wind, and though the way was bumpy with underneath chunks of ice, the skiing was good. Occasionally we stepped aside to climb an uphill slope thick with new snow so we could come down it, practicing turns. We wound fluidly down the road until blue diamonds turned us through the woods. We didn’t know where the trail would take us, but the day had a momentum of its own.

            The trail took us past a gurgling waterfall splashing holes in the snow, then uphill through the woods. When I made a wrong turn and looked up to see blue diamonds marking the trail above us, I suggested we climb the hill instead of retracing our steps, so we side-hopped up several icy, narrow humps, then chevron-stepped the rest of the way to the trail, where we took a minute to catch our breaths before continuing.

            It was beautiful skiing through the forest, with its dark trunks and snowy branches, but maneuvering between close-set trees, where the skimpy snowfall hadn’t reached the ground, was tricky. Time and again we side-stepped between trees on ice before skiing smoothly for a few yards, then crossing between trees on ice again.

            Then the forest opened up, and the trail took us more steeply uphill, before depositing us on a snowy road, where the skiing was superb, on silky smooth snow through a pristinely white landscape with trees lacy with snow on every needle. Three skiers coming down as we went up had wide smiles on their faces.

            Before crossing an open field and turning towards the wind, which we could hear above us, we stopped for lunch. Afterward we were skiing into the wind, but the snow was still good and the skiing excellent. Ahead of us we could see a long traverse across an open slope.

            There a ferocious wind was blowing directly towards us. It had blown all the snow off the mountainside, exposing a long steep slope of ice which we would have to cross step by step, jamming the metal edge of the uphill ski into the ice, hoping it would hold while we picked up the other ski to do the same. The effort was intense. The wind was biting. The ice was hard as metal. A ski would slip; recovery took strength; the going was slow. Occasionally I stopped to straighten my legs and rest a minute. Then I started again, cramming one ski into the icy hillside, then the other. At one rest I turned to Mike, behind me, and asked if he were having as much difficulty as I. He assured me he was. The slope was interminable.

            Finally I suggested we take off our skis and walk. In spite of Mike’s warning that it would be easy to lose a ski that way, I somehow, between taking off my skis and picking them up, got tangled in the mangle of skis and poles, and one ski escaped and fled down the hill. “Stop!” I cried after it. “Please stop!” As I watched, it hit a snow-filled gully and stopped. Mike carried my other ski with him as he walked up the trail towards the road while I walked carefully down the hill to retrieve my ski. Then I joined Mike on the trail, where we thought there was enough surface snow to try skiing again. We still had long stretches of ice, but we were closer now to the road and its flat surface.

            When we got to the road, we rested again, as much for our nerves as for our breath and strength. Mike mentioned how dangerous that crossing had been. In my concern for the difficulty, I hadn’t thought about the danger.

            As if in reward for the difficult crossing, the rest of the way was good skiing. By the time we reached the car, exhilaration trumped exhaustion. We had wide smiles on our faces.