Athen Sdrpc

My personal renaissance brought about such renovation with panache. I took something ugly and made from it something beautiful.
Guess what? I learned along the way. I get to do that with my life as the interior designer of my own experience on this earth.
The bedroom comes closer than any other room in defining the multifaceted soul of my life story’s lead character. After all, a bedroom facilitates the unconscious, It is where the last visual image each night and the first visual image each morning feed my psyche and spirit. It is the place I dream, the place I watch myself in the mirror—wash, dress, and pamper this incredible body that at times has been abused with too little sleep, poor food choices, and lack of exercise yet has still kept me moving and breathing for more than half a century. The bedroom, more than any other, influences my dreams, thoughts, self-talk, imagination, and inspiration to live my passions.
Shortly before I revamped my bedroom, I was asked to model in a local fashion show and surprised myself by being quickly affirmative. Then again, who wouldn’t say yes when offered a free haircut and color, facial, and style analysis? The experience taught me lessons I needed. When I showed up at the boutique to pick out clothes for the fashion show, my excitement immediately dissipated. The store manager had already selected what she wanted me to model. I sought out the fashion coordinator and whispered in horror, “I would never actuallywear these outfits in public!”
“Oh no,” she answered when she saw them. “These are not’ you.” She proceeded to weave through the shop choosing clothes for me while I browsed in one corner. Eventually she showed up, arms laden with chic capris and peasant tops, simple dresses with classic lines, turquoise beads, and bangles.
“How could you know exactly what I’d wear?” I asked, delighted.
“Because I’m trained to recognize personal style,” she offered, calling mine part town-and-country and part ethnic-artsy.
Bingo.
How she nailed that when she barely knew me, I’m still not sure. I do know, regardless of my experiments over the years with whatever’s trendy, that I’ve always come back again and again to simple lines and bold, solid colors, anything beaded, and clothing that moves or is cut at angles. Frilly cuts and flowery patterns don’t work for me, and they won’t work for my bedroom either. So I make changes to my boudoir decor within my signature style, expressed differently as I move through transitions of age, calling, and location. When I was married, raising children, and working as a magazine and book editor, I didn’t even have time to dream about signature style, let alone give it conscious attention, and least of all pay for it. But life is short. The tables have turned, and I’m here to tell about it.

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.