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.