A weekend for gathering

Ironically, it turned out not to be such a bad weekend for holiday gatherings after all.

If the Saturday before Christmas is (despite Black Friday myths to the contrary) actually the busiest shopping day of the year, then the Saturday that falls mid-December, ten days or so before Christmas depending on the year, is surely the busiest party day of the year. And this year was no exception: we had four different invitations for the weekend just past.

But of course, like people all over the country, by Friday evening, we didn’t feel like going to a single event. With the worst possible kind of news coursing off the TV screen and through the radio wires and down the Internet transom, we didn’t want to go anywhere or see anyone.

But we went anyway, and in retrospect, I realize that it was better than not going anywhere. I was not in a mood to take solace from anyone else’s words. I did not want to join a prayer service or take part in a candlelight vigil. I didn’t want to read anyone’s reflections via Facebook post or even listen to the president’s address. I felt the same way I have after other tragedies on a national scale: there is not one thing that anyone can say that will make this one iota better, and I would rather be alone with my thoughts than submit to what will feel like empty noise.

In the end, though, it was surprisingly therapeutic to be with other people: first at a large gathering of acquaintances, then at a neighborhood party, and then at the home of a close friend with just a few other families present. All of these were holiday parties planned weeks ago, and only at one did we specifically discuss the events in Connecticut that had happened just a day or two before. No one tried to offer words of comfort or solace. We just….talked. And kept each other company. And made ourselves present with each other.

It was no more or less than that, really: just being in each other’s company rather than alone. I still can’t explain why it felt unexpectedly okay, but it did. Sometimes it’s all we have for comfort: the presence of other people. And sometimes, despite my inclinations to be alone during the worst times, huddling in a group is the best response we have.

The clamor that generates creativity

Some writers dream of solitude: a Thoreauvian cabin in which to spend their hours writing; a windswept beach on which to walk alone as they let ideas percolate.

I know better: at least for me, it is the company of others and not the silence of aloneness that energizes me and fuels my creativity.

And this is fortuitous, because a solitary cabin on a windswept beach is not a place I am likely to find myself any time soon. But last night, feeling refreshed from the weekend and excited about a new work week beginning, I was struck by all the different constellations of people who had peppered my entire weekend, from start to finish.

On Friday evening, I went to a small gathering at a friend’s house: there I visited with four or five women whom I know but haven’t spent nearly enough time with lately. On Saturday afternoon, I walked for an hour with my friends Jane and Donna. On Saturday evening, one of Tim’s friends came over, and the kids and I played Parcheesi out on the screen porch long after dark.

On Sunday morning, the gathering I was in the midst of had an average age of about nine: I taught the grades 3-5 Sunday school class, and struggled to answer their provocative questions about everything from whether to use “He” or “She” when talking about God (as with so many other aspects of Unitarian Universalism, I told them, you should use whichever one is in accordance with your beliefs, or perhaps neither) to why in Biblical times animals – such as the Garden of Eden’s serpent – talked to people and today they generally do not.

On Sunday afternoon, Holly and my mother and I attended an open studios event at a large arts complex in Maynard; dozens of artists took time to talk with us about their work, which ranged from painting to jewelry making to pottery to metal crafting. In the evening, my parents came over for dinner, and as we once again sat out on the screen porch – it was an unseasonably warm, humid weekend – my father told me a story I’d never heard before about a time during his teenage years when his boat ran out of gas and he spend the night lost in the woods.

While I can’t right now say how any of these encounters will turn into a specific piece of writing, I know it’s all mingling – or perhaps composting -- somewhere in the back of my brain. By the end of the weekend, I was struck by just how lucky I am to have so many people around me so much of the time: children, adults, friends, new acquaintances. Solitude might be effective for meeting deadlines, but company is what writers need in order to generate ideas. And as much as peace and quiet sometimes seems like an unattainable goal when you are in the middle of the busy parenting years, a clamor of voices can be more artistically inspiring than any lonely windswept beach.

With apologies to Virginia Woolf and the room of my own

I feel like I owe Virginia Woolf an apology. In college, when I read her groundbreaking essay “A Room of One’s Own,” I was just taking the very first baby steps into the vague idea of a potential career in writing, but it all made sense to me: the idea that to write, a woman needs a room of her own.

Twenty-five years later, I have that room of my own. But I don’t use it anymore.

My home office is technically our spare bedroom, but it’s set up as both study and guest room, with a single bed, a night table, a beautiful angled glass-topped desk that Rick picked out for me as a birthday present and a comfortable adjustable desk chair. When we first moved here, I was amazed at what a luxury it was to have my very own home office. And when my freelance writing career became more-or-less full-time after I left the corporate sector two and a half years ago, I basked in the luxury of having my very own second-floor room to write in, clean and tidy, its windows looking out into the woods. “It’s just as Virginia Woolf said,” I told myself. “I now have what every woman who wishes to write needs: a room of one’s own.”

So I can’t quite explain why over the past few months I’ve migrated elsewhere to write. Since the kids went back to school, I’ve been working mostly at the kitchen table. The kitchen table – where women with no extra space in their homes at all tend to set up shop when they need to do paperwork! It’s as if I’m breezing past the laundry room to scrub our clothes against a rock in the stream.

But somehow my office started to feel a little bit too…well, austere, to me. It was a place for working, in a formal and compartmentalized way. Whereas in the kitchen, I can refill my coffee as often as I want to. I can heat up lunch while I’m doing a phone interview. When my 12-year-old arrives home from school in the midafternoon, I can make him a snack and oversee his homework. Previously, his arrival home from school meant the end of my work day; once I left my office space, it seemed there was no going back, but now I settle him in with something to eat, he pulls out his homework, and we work companionably together for an hour or so.

Various factors led to my departure from my office. Until last spring, I didn’t own a laptop computer, so there was no choice: I had to work at my desk because that’s where my computer was, and it wasn’t going anywhere. But not long after a friend gave me her hand-me-down ultralight notebook computer, I realized I could take it wherever I wanted to work. At the same time, I discovered that if I were sitting at the kitchen table looking out into the backyard, I could let the dog loll around outside while I was working. She’s trustworthy enough to be out on her own, but I wouldn’t have done that back when I was all the way up on the second floor.

Now, it seems as if I’m getting more enjoyment out of my surroundings. Most days, I write in the kitchen, looking out over the yard, but some days I set up shop in the sunroom and watch the southern exposure of light spreading over the fields that surround our house. Other times I pack up my materials and head up to the public library: I know it makes little sense, but sometimes I concentrate best when surrounded by other people.

Meanwhile, my office sits mostly empty other than the occasional overnight visitor using our guest-room facilities. I feel bad about the magnificent molded-steel-and-glass desk, and I think often about Virginia Woolf’s claim.

But then I remind myself that her “room of one’s own” can be taken on both a literal and metaphorical level. She meant that women who write need a space in which to do it, but also they need privacy, solitude and time to think. With two children who are in school all day and a husband whose office is fifteen miles from home, I have all the privacy and solitude I could possibly want. My “room” is made up of all the elements of my weekdays – the quiet empty house, the lack of appointments and other scheduled events during the workday, the dishwasher and clothes dryer and other myriad automated devices that keep the house running so easily -- not just the four walls of my office.

So it’s good to have a room of one’s own, and it’s good not to need one. With heat and sunlight filling the kitchen, coffee close at hand, and the dog happy to be able to lie outdoors on the warm planks of the patio, I’m content with my new workspace. And I feel certain that Virginia Woolf would understand why.

Home Alone - Six Hours of Solitude

When Rick and I mapped out our plans for last Saturday, it all sounded fine to me: he and Tim had a baseball game, so Holly and I would spend the afternoon with Rick’s family at his sister and brother-in-law’s house, where they would all be celebrating our niece’s fifth birthday.

But when I saw the e-mail from Tim’s coach saying the game had been postponed, my heart leaped with joy. “Now you can take the kids to the party and I can stay home!” I crowed. And that’s how I ended up having a Home Alone afternoon on Saturday, nearly six blissful hours of solitude.

I wasn’t exactly pursuing what I would consider a self-indulgent agenda. Although thoughts of movies, naps, long bike rides, manicures or Starbucks with my laptop flitted briefly through my head, I put myself to work from the moment they left. I cleaned the kitchen, swept the floors, picked up the kids’ rooms and our room, put away everyone’s clean laundry, weeded the flowerbeds and then loaded up the truck with trash and recycling and took a trip to the transfer station. (Thanks to the fact that our monthly visit from our house cleaner is next week, I didn’t feel compelled to start scrubbing bathrooms, which was a lucky break.)

And yet the hours of household labor made the solitude no less blissful. At other times of year, I might not see an afternoon of cleaning and tidying and yard work as such a pleasure, but this summer has been so kid-intensive that just having the silence of an empty house was all the novelty I really needed.

At this stage in my life, I don’t generally suffer from a deficit of time to myself. During the school year, the kids are out of the house six hours a day, and I’m at my desk writing, with plenty of peace and quiet even on the frequent days that Rick works at home. But this summer, time alone has been unusually hard to come by. Both sets of grandparents have been wonderful, as they always are, about taking the kids for visits, excursions or overnights, and both kids get frequent invitations from friends, but generally when one is out, the other is home. One afternoon when my mother took both kids to a movie, I found myself tied up with unplanned work-related phone calls for almost the full three hours. Being with the kids is mostly a pleasure these days, not a chore. But the fact remains that I’ve been getting very little solitude.

So when the door closed behind them, I was as eager and excited to roll up my sleeves and start some intensive housework as I normally am to leave on a vacation or try out a new restaurant. I was just so happy to be by myself. When the kids were preschoolers, I used to sometimes say to them, “I just need two minutes alone with my brain.” Meaning, I just need a little bit of time with no noise clutter, no demands on my attention: just a moment to focus on one thing that isn’t you. Saturday afternoon I felt the same way. Even though what I needed to think about was where to store Tim’s extra baseball pants and how to organize Holly’s many art supplies, that was all I wanted, a little time alone with my brain.

They came home cheerful and tired from the party. No one commented on the work I’d done – not the weed-free flower beds, not the empty recycling bins in the garage, not the fact that the carpet in Holly’s room was visible once again for the first time in weeks – but I didn’t care. I knew the house and grounds had been restored to a state of tidiness, and I’d had five precious hours free of all clamor.

We’re just about halfway through summer vacation; it was a little like the All-Star Break in Major League Baseball, the baseball-free day that every player has just prior to the All-Star Game. Like a baseball player, I ended it feeling refreshed, rejuvenated, and ready to play my best game for the second half of the summer.

I love being with my kids, but I love being with my brain too, and sometimes it feels like I can have only one or the other. Gratitude prevailed on Saturday as I basked in the serenity of a kid-free house. It was only a half-day, but I think it’s enough to tide me over until September.

Retrospective on the weekend retreat

The annual retreat weekend from which I just returned was wonderful as always, and looking back twenty-four hours after leaving the retreat house in northeast Connecticut (the “Quiet Corner,” as I’ve learned this region is nicknamed), I’m still mulling over how much information and stimulation my brain tried to process in the two days we spent there.

I had hours for reading and writing, which is the most valuable gift I could ask for these days. I finished the novel Cost by Roxana Robinson, an account of heroin addiction which was eye-opening, heartbreaking and thoroughly engrossing. I started Between Here and April by Deborah Copaken Kogan and got just far enough into it to want to keep reading. I browsed through a book that arrived by mail order just the day before we left, The Runner’s Book of Daily Inspiration by Kevin Nelson.

I wrote even more than I read: 6,400 words in all. Most of it was self-reflective journaling, though a few items were more topically oriented and may develop into future blog entries. In having so many hours for journaling, rather than my usual daily 20 minutes of Morning Pages, I uncovered so many ideas I didn’t even know I had. For example, I homed in on the fact that unlike several years leading up to now, I do now feel that I have sufficient time in my life for writing, work, sleep and exercise; what I really want is more recreation with my kids. Because they are both so independent when they’re home and find so many ways to keep busy on their own – Tim by reading or playing computer games; Holly by inviting friends over, doing art projects or playing endless games of imaginary house or school – it’s easy for each of us to go off in our own direction when we’re all home. And in some ways, this is good; after years of caring for small children who needed near-constant attention, it still feels like a luxury to me to have my whole family at home and still be able to write or fold laundry without anyone demanding at least half my attention. But in the writing I did this weekend, I admitted the pendulum has swung the other way; I’d like to be doing more things together. Walks, hikes, bike rides, cultural events, board games. So I am resolved to try harder to draw the kids back into group activities that include me.

I spent far more time exercising outdoors than I do in a normal weekend at home. I ran five miles on Saturday and four on Sunday, and took an hour-long powerwalk on Saturday afternoon. I ended the day with the aching leg muscles that come from the kind of intensity I don’t normally experience anymore.

Though the greatest draw of the retreat weekend for me is always solitude, it’s also a good opportunity to visit with other people, and I had plenty of time over meals and other gathering times to catch up with long-time friends and meet new ones. The most significant impression the visits with old friends left me with is how much can change in a year. It’s been exactly 52 weeks since the last retreat, and that was when I last saw several of the women who were there. One, who was widowed three and a half years ago, has a new boyfriend. Another left her partner and says she is now much happier than she imagined she would be, enjoying old friends and a household to herself. One woman told me about her daughter’s joyful first semester at college; another described her son’s struggles with the intensity and sometimes eclectic constraints of his first few months at West Point. A grandmother with a granddaughter Holly’s age told me how her daughter handles 7-year-old tantrums. A new acquaintance told me about her husband’s hobby flying lightweight airplanes, something I’d never heard of before, and another new acquaintance told me about attending veterinary school in the West Indies.

In past years, I’ve returned home from these weekends to a minor dose of domestic chaos: messy household, needy children, those things popularly called fires to put out. This year it wasn’t like that. I came home midafternoon to a sparkling clean kitchen and the laundry I’d sorted on Friday all put away in drawers. Holly was playing with a friend; Tim was reading a book he’d picked up the day before. The kids told me about going out for dinner and an excursion to the local bookstore. Coming home to a peaceful household only enhanced the sense of peace that had developed during the retreat, and while I’m happy to be back, I’m also happy to have learned, heard, contemplated and discussed so much in the space of 48 hours.

Running at the start of the evening on the first day of fall

Running with Tim over the course of two years was such an enriching experience, but on days like today I can’t help but acknowledge how great running alone can be. Once again, I didn’t get out until after dinner because of everyone’s schedules, but we had an early dinner so I was out the door at 6:45, when there was still plenty of light, albeit grayish, in the sky. The temperature was mild; it was ninety minutes past the official start of autumn. Belle and I ran for 30 minutes, looping through the Center and then up to the soccer fields and back.

Two nights ago I was frustrated not to get out until evening, but today it seemed like the ideal time. The kids had a half-day at school and my workday was shortened even further by a volunteer stint at the school library and the need to bring a casserole up to the teachers’ luncheon before dismissal time, so I didn’t want to cut into my work time for a run. And then the kids and I spent the whole afternoon together with what could best be described as a mercurial ambience. Holly had a friend over for a while and they played together very happily – they sang and did art projects – but the friend ended up in tears when it was time to leave. Tim woke up this morning seeming utterly exhausted and didn’t shake off his air of melancholy weariness all day – I know this because I saw him during my volunteer time midmorning – then at 2 PM fell into a sound sleep from which I had to wake him for his 3:00 trumpet lesson.

Later in the afternoon, I suggested both of them do their homework in the kitchen while I start preparing dinner, which sounded like a cozy plan and for a while it was, but then at some point Holly flogged Tim with her blanket, which infuriates him, and then he teased her for counting window panes instead of windows when the assignment asked how many windows our house had, and then Holly dissolved in tears when I told her that since the assignment said “Use a lot of colors in your drawing of your house,” she had to use some colors, and also that if she didn’t know today’s date she had to research it rather than put a question mark on the date line at the top of the paper. As I said, mercurial.

All of which is why I was guiltily delighted to take off right after dinner for a run, and it was such a good run, too. Not just because of the solitude but even physically it was great; my breathing was very steady, for some reason, and my pace felt just right. I listened to a “Fresh Air” podcast, first an interview with Lebron James and then a story about a Palestinian filmmaker. Terry Gross is such an inspiration to me; I learn so much from listening to her interview people, especially those with whom she seems to have so little in common like Lebron James. Her interview over the summer with comic Artie Lange was one of the most interesting segments of radio I’ve ever heard.

Belle and I didn’t pass any other runners or even any drivers we recognized; we just sailed along through the gathering dusk, happy to be out alone in the cooling air as the day, and in fact the summer of 2009, drew to an end. Running in the midmorning has been great lately, but sometimes the end of the day is best: for the peace, the solitude, the closure it brings on whatever has happened during the course of the day.