Space Fantasy
It is the height of summer in the Northeast, a night cool enough to turn off the AC, open the door to my bedroom deck, let the outside in. Immediately I’m captivated by the symphony of cicadas and katydids and crickets playing counterpoint to each other.
During the day the thud of a bird fooled by a glass door jars me. I’ve seen a nursing doe in my backyard. My husband has witnessed two bucks, antlers locked in a fight. Squirrels use my stone bench as a surface to crack acorns, unaware of me watching. Until I open the door and they scamper away. Every which way I turn in my house, glass doors and large windows greet me. The deconstruction and reconstruction my house has gone through over the years is marked by my husband’s vision, which renders our home inside-out/outside-in by virtue of its integration of exterior and interior space. Diaphanous is a word that comes to mind.
I relish the splatter of raindrops without getting wet.
On nights when the moon is full I bask in the angled patches of light, my moon shadows, cast wherever there is a window in its path.
In Gaston Bachelard’s profound work, The Poetics of Space, he writes: “thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated. All our lives we come back to them in our daydreams.”
An entire past comes to dwell in a new house.
I grew up in a small Brooklyn housing-project apartment, two bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen with just enough room for my mother to do her magic (not a second thought to the washing machine crammed into an eight-by-ten space). I shared a room with my brother until those pre-teen years crept up on us and my parents took to the sofabed in the living room. An accordion door afforded some semblance of privacy.
A room of my own was a liberation cut short when my grandmother moved in with us sometime after my grandfather died. Each night the trundle bed in my bedroom would be opened so that she could go to sleep before I did. I would finish doing homework or reading for pleasure at the kitchen table, after which I would join my family to watch TV in the living room. After which I would slip into my bed, trapped between a wall and a snoring, fleshy woman.
My grandparents had owned a candy store that my uncle took over when my grandfather died. My mother helped out on Saturdays, and one of my favorite things to do (when I wasn’t scooping out ice cream for cones or making egg creams) was to wander on over to Macy’s Department Store just down the block, straight to the furniture department. I would settle myself on a sturdy, cushioned couch or sit back in a club chair, my land of make-believe living room settings far more satisfying than any dolls’ house. Sometimes the bedroom settings would call out to me and I would choose a bed (not too soft, not too hard, just right) draped in a flowery comforter and lie down, never closing my eyes, luxuriating in the comfort of a full mattress all to myself. No one, salesperson or curious customer, ever bothered me. It was the cusp of the ’60s, a time of social upheaval, yes, but the world clearly felt safe enough for a mother to give this kind of license to a ten-year-old.
Saturdays sometimes had me off to the movies with my cousins, the Loew’s Kings Theater within walking distance from the candy store. Majestic may be a word lost on a young girl, but even then I sensed what it embodied. The Ladies’ Room, with its grand anteroom set apart from the bathroom stalls, was where I held court. I could be a princess enthroned on one of the tufted banquettes greeting imaginary visitors. Or just a girl taking possession of her very own private space in a public setting.
The world is large, but in us
it is as deep as the sea. — R.M. Rilke
Looking back I can see how secretly transforming a space to live out harmless fantasies sparked the imaginative tools for writing fiction.
When I write, I am my thoughts. I relish the hours caught up in the warp and weft of words. When I meditate, ideally I’m not my thoughts. Yet to let them float in and out of consciousness, like clouds or waves, is not always an easy thing, what with that monkey mind kicking in.
Yo-Yo Ma has famously said that music happens between the notes. I focus on the space between breaths, the nanosecond when the breath turns from inhale to exhale/exhale to inhale. Little by little the contractive rhythm of thinking gives way to the rhythm of easy breathing. Breath by breath, meditation becomes my portal to a space I relish beyond thoughts. Colors and images surface. I see myself riding a wave on a surfboard. Or standing at the edge of a canyon. Or just sitting, cross-legged, a woman inhabiting the endless reaches of her own private space.
