If the heart of a house is its kitchen, our house used to be almost all heart. For seventeen years, most of the daily life of my family took place in one room. The room, about sixteen by twenty feet, functioned as kitchen, living room, dining room, and playroom, but it felt more as though it was a kitchen with a couch and a couple of armchairs, a table, boxes of toys, and a piano. It was a cozy room with a wood stove, kind of like a nest that held our family life.
Before my husband and I had children, we dreamed about an addition to our little house with a film lab, a dance studio, a pottery studio, and a greenhouse. Then we got busy having kids and trying to pay for them, and put the dream in escrow.
When the kids were small and during the years they home-schooled, we spent a lot of time together in that one room. Often we went about our individual activities, intimately aware of other family members – sometimes a wonderful feeling and other times not. Our daughter practiced the piano an hour or two every day, and the memory of that sound is as strong and solid as the black upright piano that still takes up more than its share of the little room. She’s a gifted musician, but there was no corner in the house her music didn’t reach.
Twenty years later we finally framed in our long-planned addition and the size of the house nearly doubled. Even before it was done, the addition started to change our lives. The first winter it tantalized us from behind a plastic wall. On warm days we’d walk around inside, as if we were taking a stroll in an indoor mall. My husband liked having all that space because, as he said, his “being” didn’t bounce back so quickly. The new space began subtly to transform us, tempting our unconscious lives with creative possibilities.
We finished my daughter’s bedroom first because she wasn’t going to live at home for much longer. It was as if she’d been holding her breath in the loft that used to be her bedroom, because she exploded into her new space. She took the room by storm; finally there was a place for her clothes and books, and her sewing and art projects poured out onto every flat surface in the room. Our son’s old bedroom had been squeezed under the eaves behind my husband’s tiny, crammed office, so we finished his bedroom next, and he imploded into it; finally a room all his own where he could retreat in peace and be king of his own castle.
With our interests now privatized in these ways, each of us has grown as individuals. Instead of a film studio, my husband now has a good-sized office – his old one combined with our son’s former bedroom. His project of working with kids to build and sail wooden boats has gotten underway partly because he has the room to think and spread out his ideas. When our daughter, a sailor, comes home from living in a cabin, her belongings scatter across her room like shells and seaweed on the beach after the tide has come in. Soon enough things retreat to closets and shelves to make way for a wave of creative endeavors to come rolling in: artistic photo albums, greeting cards, books sewed out of recycled cereal boxes. Our son, at age seventeen, has watched practically every movie ever made, and is now making a movie for a school portfolio. Our dog may be the only one who hasn’t benefited from the house’s expansion, because he has to trot here and there keeping track of us, but at least he gets some exercise when we’re too busy with our projects to take him for a walk.
The greenhouse became a reality and is full of vegetables and flowers; the pottery studio fell by the wayside for lack of interest. We came to think that the big new room downstairs might now become our living room, and we tried to use it as one but usually ended up back in the kitchen squeezed into a love seat and an old chair or two in front of the wood stove. The only time anyone used the living room couch in the addition was when they wanted to get away from everyone else.
When the new living room clearly wasn’t becoming a room the family lived in, a new plan came over the horizon. It wasn’t so much a plan as an idea that leaked out of me – that the big room should become mine (how could I dare to claim the biggest and newest room in the house?). Well, it isn’t totally mine yet, but I’ve been slowly and inconspicuously taking over the room, keeping half totally empty for dance and yoga, and using the other half for writing. I think the room is finding its true potential as home for my creative pursuits (and the couch is handy for naps). I bring in a book here and a table there, and pretend no one notices I’m expanding my domain. And so far no one has challenged me. Perhaps they’re too busy doing their own thing in all their own places.
