High Castle? Hobbit Hole?
Does location really matter?
From the work-in-progress, Writing in Nebraska, a practical guide to first drafts.
When we moved into our little rent house on the Air Force base on the prairie, I was given the corner bedroom closest to my parents, which was painted a pretty, light blue. The room had windows facing north and east, and was charming in the morning light. My brother was assigned the brown bedroom in the middle of the house, which was the color that my dad referred to as cricket vomit. I’m sure that selling point sealed the deal for my brother. (He claims no recollection. Smart.)
During our first winter snow season, I would lie awake listening to the prairie winds swirling around the corner of the house and deep into my soul. My fears careened between hypothermia in that blue icebox and certain electrocution since my Sears electric blanket was set on “SCORCH.”
As a good little soldier/military brat, I didn’t complain. I lay there in the dark in the fetal position thinking about that cheerful Andersen fairy tale “The Little Match Girl.” This street urchin sells matches on the street to buy coal for her family. But she is so cold that she uses the matches to stay warm. As she tragically reduces her inventory to nil and freezes to death, she sees visions of her grandmother in heaven and longs to join her—typical euphoric hallucinations of hypothermia. The next morning, the astute townsfolk see her frozen corpse—the rosy cheeks, the burnt out matches in her stiff hands They exclaim, “She must have tried to warm herself.” Good lateral thinking, folks. To end the story on a bright note (?), Andersen writes, “Nobody knew what beautiful visions she had seen.”
As I lay there in the blue room, certain I would die, I too wondered what they would say in the morning. “Doesn’t she look beautiful with frost on her eyelashes?” Or in the case of electrocution, “What is going on with her hair?”
Apparently, my mom was worried as well, so the Big Bedroom Swap happened. My brother who was made of sterner stuff would get the Arctic hut, and I would be closer to civilization—central heating, the bathroom, and the western sun if it ever came out again.
Once I was able to turn the blanket down to a mere SIZZLE, I caught up on my sleep and discovered the rich after-bedtime life of my parents. I could hear the muffled conversations, the ice tinkling in cocktail glasses, the Latin jazz records they played. I could also detect when they went to the basement to watch Johnny Carson. On the nights that George Carlin or Jonathan Winters were guests, they would wake us and bundle us down to the basement sofa to watch.
In the Hillcrest house, the drinking and music happened in the living room upstairs and the TV was in the basement along with the piano on which I practiced “Merrily We Go Along” in the tempo grave e doloroso.
My risk of frostbite diminished, I settled in, and my bedroom was soon a general store where baked beans, Vienna sausages and Campbell’s soup from the commissary were arranged on the ironing board with price tags. Family members (my parents) were invited in to purchase their groceries for the week. But the store business failed—possibly a unit economy issue. My supply chain and my revenue stream were one and the same.
I sold my inventory (took it back to the cupboard), and put in a library, giving numbers and circulation cards to my books from the Scholastic Book Fair. My father was a frequent patron.
The brown room became the hearth of my imagination—a library, a store, headquarters, sanctuary. If I was bickering with my brother, or peevish about something, Mom would send me to my room (after piano practice and dusting). Ha ha, the joke’s on her.
My room was awesome. The cricket vomit walls now appeared to be an inviting Kraft Caramel, the perfect complement to my Harvest Gold electric blanket (which had clashed horribly with the Ice Floe down the hall.)
The joke’s on me too, Mom. Like a robot vacuum, she knew I would return to base and reset—it was a safe place for all those big feelings. (More likely, Mom’s thoughts ran more along the lines of “get out of my hair.”)
After a few minutes of rage tears and the sugar crash, I would espy Thunderbolt, one of my model horses, and decide that his brand needed a refresh. Or I would again read Happiness is a Warm Puppy, by Charles Schultz. Snoopy was really big in the ‘60s and I of course had Suzy, a beagle. I was on trend.
I claimed my space—the cricket vomit caramel room was all mine. Even in the middle of that house with all the noise from the living room, with parents drinking, listening to music, arguing, the cricket vomit dark Karo syrup bedroom became the backdrop for reading, playing and being.
Happiness was indeed a room of one’s own, and it was all I needed to start my life of writing.
In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf wrote about women’s right to creative expression. (Apologies to her because I know she wasn’t being as literal as a room with cricket vomit walls vs. glacial blue). She asserted that we need our own space and the time for that creation, but at the time, women were generally excluded from unfettered creative “labor.” Being tasked with the burdensome emotional labor of running a household and raising a family would fry any brain cells with a coherent thought at the end of the day.
Her book is a manifesto about the injustice of a man’s claim to creativity being noble, and a woman’s claim being nigh impossible logistically and just plain weird philosophically. Writing and creating were just too troublesome for the ladies.
Instead, Woolf’s “room” is more of a mining claim, a declaration of the right to unearth one’s creativity and express one’s voice. The colors and location of that freedom do not matter.
