window facing the woods.....

I have always wanted a room of my own.It was a conscious need growing up when I shared an 8x10 room with my sister.When young, we shared the same bed and one night she fell asleep with gum in her mouth and we awakened stuck to each other and the bedpost.Maybe after that was when we got twin beds.

Cramped doesn't do justice to the smallness and lack of privacy of that room.We were very different in our tastes and needs and I recall that at an early age I wanted this room to reflect me.Order,pink,books,made bed.Simple requirements that went unheeded for many years.I did homework in my bed since the small desk was inadequate for my books and papers.I read something by Virginia Wolff that struck me:if women in the past had a place of their own to spread out there papers,pens etc.that would have been undisturbed by family members there would have been more women writers in the centuries before her.I smile.

When I saw a table book called :"A Room of Her Own",I grabbed it and I wander through it from time to time.Beautiful pictures of different women's refuge rooms.When I told my friend Missy about it,she ordered it immediately.The need may be universal.

I finally have this,my room.It faces West towards the river and the woods.The two original windows weren't enough so my husband had a third,middle one, put in.Here I am in my prayer/computer/writing room watching a flock of red winged black birds perched like winter ornaments in the pines.From here I see the grey woods ,ice on branches of all trees.On my wall,I have a small picture of a woman stretching as a reminder ,another ,a woman reading from a book surrounded by candles with the saying,"nurturing my spirituality gives me joyful exuberance throughout the day" and a third a picture of a bench in a park covered in snow,two favorite things and with books on the bench no less.Three favorites.

There were two windows in my old bedroom,one a dormer window high and, with a dresser in front, you couldn't see out .The side window was the one that I could look out and see the maples on Bedford Avenue.Sometimes,I would lay on the floor and just look at them, swaying in the breeze.Or lit from below by a street lamp.Light green leaves in Spring and in fall, a feast of color.In winter,I would walk my dog among them and think how unfamiliar they seemed,more like steel columns.

After I moved to Denver in the 70s,my Mother wrote that all the maples had been taken down.They were interfering with the pipes.I was glad I had moved away.I never see a maple leaf that I don't think of them guarding that small cramped room and lifting the spirits of the little girl that thought they were her own.