No Perfect Room
Virginia Woolf & the Recycling Bin
When I was in elementary school, I wanted to live the lives of the Little Women. I imagined an attic hideaway where I could confide in my diary, write stories, and compose love letters. The kind of attic filled with old furniture, chairs, and a chest of old dresses from a grandmother no longer around.
So, I would climb up the ladder affixed to a wall in our garage, push aside the “roof” and enter our stifling hot attic. I would tiptoe down the 2x4 framing to the far end and perch myself at the intersection of two beams. There I would write in my small diary surrounded by a sea of pink insulation and try to sniff in fresh air from the vent above me.
In high school, I read Virginia Woolf’s book, A Room of One’s Own, and decided I needed one too. So I imagined my bedroom was that room. The door sat across from the entrance to our kitchen and down the hall from the bathroom I shared with my sister. My little brother often barged in unannounced making weird 8-year-old boy noises trying to make me laugh. It felt like my mom was always calling out “Dinner time!” just when I was in a flow. 

And yet, I sat on my bed with George Winston’s lyrical piano pieces being piped through the headphones of my Walkman and scribbled away despite the chaos around me.
Many of the stories I wrote for La Pomme de Portland, both the blog and eventually the book, were written outside on my laptop which I perched on top of our recycling container. I would scoop up a soggy ball into the ChuckIt and fling it as far as I could into the woods. While my extremely active male golden retriever ran off to hunt it down, I would quickly type in my next set of words. The dog got his exercise in. I got my thousand words in.
Now I write and work from my desk in my dining room. And I say “dining room” loosely as it sits in the middle of our house between the front door and the kitchen. It’s not its own separate space as one might imagine. Anyone coming or going walks through there. We’re just up from a busy city street and our house has a continuous stream of city noise: backup beeping, fire truck and ambulance sirens, people shouting, cars revving their engines more than necessary.
It’s not quite the peaceful English countryside I once envisioned.
It’s still on my bucket list to have a Pinterest-worthy room of my own.
But I’ve learned I can’t wait for it.
When I’ve told myself, “I’ll start when the kids are older… when the dog settles down… when I have a proper office…a room of my own” it’s often just a quieter form of procrastination.

So I’ve written in attics thick with insulation.

On beds with headphones blocking out dinner calls.

On top of recycling bins.

And now at a dining room table with sirens outside the window.
The room has changed.
The writing hasn’t.
Cheers,

Carrie