Athen Sdrpc

A bedroom is your place of retreat within the refuge you call home. Its rituals are encouraged by the details with which you surround yourself: A crystal goblet of water refilled every evening at bedtime? A pretty trivet waiting for your morning latte, sipped while you prop yourself against mounds of pillows? Cuddling at dawn with the best of company—favorite books camped beside your bed? In the evening is journalism inspired by the imagined history of a hand-pieced quilt? My quilt is nubby with tiny loops of thread, the blocks worn to near translucence. Like the woman who created it from scraps of her life, I write my story in a blank volume—one stitch at a time. How about wallpaper of your own invention? I created a wall covered with Victoria and Country Living magazine photographs: a collage of golden pinks and pale reds around the window at the head of my bed. An altar reminds me to pause and remember, thanking God for the people and things I love. Photographs or outdoorsy things perch on my bedroom shelf as icons: seashells, river pebbles, a bouquet of dried roses, pieces of driftwood lashed with leather and tied with feathers. These are personal ways to thank God and remind myself of his love.

Starting out all over again was like being let loose in a wildflower field, complete with fragrance, color, and newly felt freedom to wander and wonder. My boudoir self deserved some complementary attention. A little paint. A lot more love. Thoughtful redefinition. Why not start with that archetype of intimacy, sexuality, and personal mystique, I wondered, the bed? It’s been said that men prefer four-post beds, preferably spiraling (ooh-la-la), and that women look for sleigh beds or curved head- and foot- boards—resembling the womb shape.
I didn’t want a conventional headboard at all. I got a new bed (a donation from my darling mother) and moved it under the front window, which was exactly the same width. I layered sheer embroidered curtains, French fabricated and picked up at a closeout sale, for privacy and as an artful crown over white pillow shams and duvet. A swoop of gauzy fabric, twisted and hung a little funky from the ceiling, created just the off-center romantic look I hoped for. It was a frolicsome solution, and no pennies or time were spent shopping for a mass-produced piece of furniture that actually serves little purpose.

My favorite weekend getaway on the Oregon coast, the Sylvia Beach Hotel, is laced through and through with sense of place and boudoir sweet. For an avid reader, this literary hotel (complete with the Tables of Content dining room) doubles as a spa for the soul. Every room is named after an author and decorated in the theme of his or her work. You can spend your stay in the ambient femininity of the Emily Dickinson Room, in the virile humor of the Mark Twain Room, in the fin-studded primary colors of the Doctor Seuss Room (goldfish in a bowl, bedside), or in the “rose is a rose” elegance of the Gertrude Stein Room.
It is to this creative establishment that I’ve come alone when fighting the blues or when wanting to renew my sense of the poetic against practical demands. After becoming single again, I received inspiration from the Sylvia Beach Hotel to reinvent my bedroom. The irony is that in its first “life,” my bedroom was the garage of our small house. This fact makes me marvel because the allegory seems too perfect: a boudoir (a word from the French that means “to pout”) that was once a garage and then a bedroom for a marriage that was not what it seemed. Reincarnating the room a third time into a single-again honeymoon haven is proof that any place so poisoned can, indeed, become sweet again. For romance has little to do with a man.

When the children and I got into our Ford Pinto to leave, my two-year–old climbed into the backseat and announced emphatically, “I like those people. They have a nice warm!”
My toddler defined that day the threshold where wood, brick, and mortar are transformed into sacred space. A threshold is both a point of entry and a level above which something is true and below which it is not. A “nice warm” sensed upon entering someone’s home is not a matter of elaborate decor, parklike grounds, or gourmet cooking. It doesn’t take loads of time, energy, or money. Our friend Eva didn’t have those things. A “nice warm” starts with who you are, not with what you have. Engendered where your instinct for nesting meets your affection for other people, a “nice warm” is the threshold above which a house becomes a home.
If you wish to tap the enigma of what it means to emote a “nice warm,” start by finding the sacred play in every day—right where you are with what you have in your hands. After all, a child’s play is actually a child’s work, isn’t it? As a product of the 1950s and ‘60s, when domesticity reigned in my home, my personal amusement usually involved playing house wherever I found a bit of space and solitude. On a tree stump in the sun, I baked mud pies filled with grass and mud, sprinkled with pebbles. The best mud could be made by pouring a bucketful of water into the soil behind the garage and beside the alley. I let it soak and turned my attention to the hollyhocks growing around the garbage cans. My mother had taught me to make “ladies” of the blossoms—a large blossom for the skirt, a small one for the bodice, and a tiny one for the bonnet, all attached to the stem. These pink dolls decorated my tea table, a cardboard box where I later served mud concoctions to a three-year-old in briefs and cowboy boots. Soon my little brother was off again on his stick horse.