The Perfect Bedroom

Posted on August 3, 2003 in Book of Days North Carolina

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about a bedroom.

It was the best bedroom I ever slept in and I have missed it ever since I moved out of the house on Trinity Avenue in Durham, North Carolina. It wasn’t the people who made the place but the room. A corner room in the back of a massive house, windows opening out on two sides, an old-fashioned radiator, and best of all — space. Space for my bed, space for a desk, space for the big red easy chair that I’ve carted from place to place ever since. I could take two strides from my queen size bed, situated in the middle of the room, to any wall. I placed two sawhorses and an old door against one wall and made it my desk. (I still have the Michigan armchair that I used, too.) My time there wasn’t much for romance — I slept with my girl friend once in that room and we broke up two days later — but there I exercised for a time my insatiable habit for writing.

The room offered plenty of objects and vantages to stimulate me. Next to one of the windows was a seat with a chest built into it. The view out the side and out the back wasn’t the greatest: I enjoyed a view of the abandoned house on one side and our backyard, which was perpetually filled with old cars, out the back windows.

I loved opening all the windows when a storm swept through the brick tobacco warehouses and shook the house. I loved pressing my nose to the glass when it snowed. The room mates left something to be desired, but I held my tongue mostly, because the room was so damned special. You could close the door on them and be elsewhere in two seconds.

I don’t know when the house was built. Wood made up the whole frame. We didn’t have grass in the front yard because it was too heavily shaded. I could step through my window onto the roof of a side porch — which one of my room mates didn’t like because she was afraid I’d fall through. So I didn’t do it very often. My cat at the time, a harlequin-face calico named Brandy Whine, loved to go out on the porch roof or jump from the window sill onto an elm where she ambushed squirrels or slipped into the adjacent derelict to chase rats. When I packed my things and Ms. Whine to move down the road to Chapel Hill, I knew that it would always be there, my perfect room, a memory of the honey that had once slipped over my tongue.

• Shameless Agitator
  
• Joker on the Run

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: If only….