This past weekend, I decided to move all the furniture in my writing room so that my cosy chair would face the window and I could see the trees changing colors. I’ve got a view of three trees: one yellow, one still green, and one turned a deep red. All that autumn color is a gorgeous sight.
After the chair was in its new spot, I needed to find a place for my desk and computer cart. A bunch of experiments later, I have a nice newly arranged writing room. What is it about moving furniture around that produces a sense of energy, of new possibility?
The best part about this latest furniture move is I only had to reposition one picture. Also, the hook that holds my robe was right over my laptop, so that had to go, too. I put a photo there instead, one of my favorites from my friend Debbie’s portfolio. She did both my book covers and I’ve got a lot of her work hanging around the house.
Hanging the photo taken on a hilltop in Maui, facing out to the ocean, I flashed on the first picture I ever hung in the first home I ever lived in on my own. I was really young, still a teenager, and I’d been rootless for years, bouncing from a handful of relatives to endless party crash pads, and one memorable summer, an abandoned car in my friend Scott’s cornfield.
Somehow I had come out of those experiences, which included a lot of travel by thumb across the country, whole and intact. And, with the help of my parents, I had finally found a home all my own. It was my dad’s place, really. He and mom were back together for the zillionth time, and they said I could live in the house rent free my senior year of high school if I kept my grades up, my friends, out, and paid the utility bills.
I, who’d traveled ultralight for so long, now had a telephone. And a telephone bill. The feeling of moving into that place was one of finally coming home after a long, tiring journey. My mom had saved a box of my things, and that first day alone in that first home of my own, I went though it, and that’s when I found the picture. An old friend of the family, a Chinesse man named Yet Foo Wong, had given me the decorative Asian landscape. It was in a beautiful wood frame and had all the traditional Asian art themes, flowering trees, flowing water, a bridge.
I looked around my new four walls and found the perfect place to hang that picture. My dad had equipped me with a toolbox of the essentials: hammer, nails, screwdriver. In no time, I had the picture hung. I sat on the sofa looking at it. In that moment, the house began to feel less like an exile and more like a place to call my own.
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