I sit in a corner of my bedroom where I’ve arranged two oblong tables in an L-shape, and on the wall behind me is a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf handmade a very long time ago, and filled with writing files, dictionaries, reference books, books of inspiration, etc. This is, for the last five years, my “writing room” - a 4 x 6 corner of my bedroom. My two cats are both settled in around me, one on the floor by my feet and one on the table near my elbow - slyly (he thinks) moving closer to me inch by inch as I type, so that soon he can cover my arm, increasing the typos exponentially. They’re in the room with me - they’re always in the room with me, because they’re afraid to go out into the other rooms of the house, where my daughters three dogs are roaming, pursued (loudly) around the living room, dining room, kitchen and hallway by my daughter’s three daughters, while daughter and her husband try to get prepared for work the next day,
It’s a noisy house, a busy house, a chaotic house. They all moved in with me at the beginning of the pandemic, the week lock downs started to happen, when they moved back to the town where I live. Their plan had been to stay with me a week or two while they found a place for rent and get settled in new jobs. The pandemic (and both illness and injury in the family) changed all those plans. It's now four 1/2 years later, and we think they are six or seven months from getting their own place.
From time to time, out with friends for coffee, I’ve lamented that I miss the quiet life I had before all this, that the endless noisiness and constant movement and mess of such a large group felt - I believe the word I used was “relentless.” And then a curious thing happened - I opened my mouth and told a parallel truth - that I found the chaos swirling around me strangely calming - that I found myself at my desk writing for hours at a time, that I hadn’t felt so creative since the days I was in grad school in a big house with my sister and also a friend in need staying with us, and our three kids and a full time job of my own. All those days were filled with chaos - kitchens overwhelmed by the need for special diets and without enough time for everyone to do their cooking or enough dishes kept clean for everyone to eat off of.
And it felt, in spite of all that, like a place of light and music. And so, even as I curse the lack of a clean mug in the morning, I am in a place that I know, a place that is exactly what I need. Light and music, even when I work far into the dark and the house is silent. I am grateful for that, and for my mother, who trained me for it without even knowing she was doing it.
The summer I was twelve, my older sister brought home from her college six girls who had nowhere to go for the summer. My mom welcomed them, got our church to drum up a number of cots and folding beds, and set up a “college dorm” in the biggest bedroom in the house - the one that had been hers and my father’s - setting up two rows of three cots, each with a small shelf beside and space for a footlocker at the foot. There were six sisters in my family, and with the six strays my sister brought home and my mother, that made thirteen females under one roof. For three and a half months. And what I remember most about that summer is a sense of light and music. Voices sharing lives, stories, and laughter.
That summer I began writing my first novel, and wrote my first three poems, two of which were published. I started painting, and composed two piano pieces. When the house was all motion and noise, I could often be found at the table in my room - an old claw-foot table by the window, where I would pull the curtains out around the table and my world would be the cave of the blue curtains lit by my little desk lamp, the paper in front of me, the stars outside the window, and all of it accompanied by the music of a crazy full house, glowing with light.
Understand, none of this was about families who could afford strains on the budget - my mom, after my father died, was a cafeteria cook and every one of those girls had to find a summer job to keep everyone fed. My mother’s church helped some, but financially it was day to day. The same was true when I was in grad school - my husband’s first job after getting out of the service was barely enough for rent and food, and my loans for grad school barely covered school expenses. Everyone who came to stay with us pitched in, everyone helped. And the same is true now. There is no luxury here. It is constant work. For all of us.
And, in spite of that, in the two-plus years since I last posted on this blog, I have published over seventy poems, three essays, won/placed in two short-story contests, and got a nomination for Best of the Net. Is it possible that I did all this work as escape? Maybe. To take my mind off the financial mess always hanging over us? Perhaps.
But I would say to those who raise those points: so what?
If that escape spurs me to dig deep enough to write the work I’ve done in the past two years, I embrace it. I look forward to more chaos, more crowding, more stresses that make me look to the source of my strength so that I can bring it to the surface when I and my family need it most - and that source is the family and human spirit I learned from my mother - that if someone needs help and you can, you just help… that’s it. No question or, as mom would say, “no buts about it.”
So if you have circumstances that feel they stand between you and the writing you want to do, I say it is up to you. Even if all you can do is speak kindly to one person per day - make that connection, learn their story, learn that we all have stories and let that be your light and music. If there is energy that saps you, use that energy, transform it, make it music and light to show you what it is you need to be writing, and get a piece of paper and pencil - and begin.