anatomy of a space 2

I’ve known that I need a headboard or better yet, an entire bed, for a long time, like since I first glimpsed by pal Maura’s geometric one in graduate school. My first thought upon seeing hers was, “wow, she’s has, like, real furniture.” At the time, I think, I was still sleeping on a futon with Arlo at my feet.

This bed, now looking so sad, was my first real bed in adulthood, one that I begged my mother to buy for me when I was 26 by pleading with her that I’d never find a husband if I was still sleeping on a futon. She believed me and bought the bed. It did take me another five years or so to meet my husband, but I got the bed nonetheless. It’s had a suspicious one-side slope for the better part of my relationship with J. We’ve never been able to diagnosis it properly, but whoever sleeps on the right side is forced to go it at a 15º decline. It might, then, not make the trek to Kentucky.

The bed’s sadness, if I do say so myself, comes not so much from its slope and missing headboard as it does from its ragtag assortment of linens. I bought the fading quilt on a spring day in 2001. I was driving south from great barrington — a charming if not self-righteously liberal town in western massachusetts near where I both went to high school and then taught years later — toward lakeville, connecticut when I saw a semi-truck open on the side of the road with a hand-painted “quilts 4 sale” sign. You don’t often see semi-truck quilt sales on the side of a road and so I stopped to check it out. I found this one in a huge pile of not-very-compelling-but-pretty-cheap cotton quilts. There was never anything particular charming about it. It’s neither handmade nor interesting, but somehow it’s stuck around all these years. When I think about it I mostly see Arlo curled up on it, annoyed when I dared to take a mere third of the bed.

And yes, I do sleep with five pillows. I like to make a little fortress around my body at night. They each have distinct purposes, but I’ll not bore you (or myself) with the details. Their threadbare pink cases, though, deserve a mention. In my grandmother’s late years she took to sewing all manner of cases, most of them loud and garish. I think I have just two sets left. Both are falling apart at the seams, but are so soft you almost want to weep with pleasure. They need to be retired soon to a box of keepsakes that I can take out one day when I’m finding it hard to remember her precise seams or her flare for the floral print.

It’s fitting that my grandmother’s cases rest below her twin sister’s painting. When Aunt Mimi — my mom’s namesake — gave me this painting, she told me that she could “see things.” I asked her what she meant and was treated to this amazing rumination on the ghostly, the benevolently possessed. She told me that she was clairvoyant. These eerie flowers remind me of her and that conversation. I like the way that she renders the living flower with a deathly shadow. Sometimes I feel terribly at emotional odds with my family, but this painting reminds me of my affective inheritance.

Sharing my bedside table like this feels a bit like opening my soul to scrutiny. But here it is. The stack of books make up my snippets of late-night reading. I’ve loved dipping into Tinkers, a quiet novel, this winter. The rest are mostly about anxiety and panic, a bit of yoga and some artistic cultivation. I don’t spend a lot of time reading books at night, but I’ve shoved my stack of New Yorkers under the bed. I also keep my friend Emily’s yearly poetry calendar on this table. She anthologies poems from the previous year’s reading each fall and it’s always the best treat to get the new volume in autumn and connect to her each week with a new selection. And then there’s the reminder of life on the second floor of a busy city street: earplugs. I’ve developed an addiction to them and now I can’t sleep anywhere, even in silent Kentucky, without them. And there’s Arlo once again. This photo, partially occluded here, is one of my favorite shots of him. Elena took it at a party and it shows him begging for a bite of cake. He was always and forever hoping for a bite.

Finally, on the wall beside my bed is this funny little series of J and I. Our wedding photographer took these last November, when I insisted that he try out for the role. I'm hopelessly unphotogenic and I wanted to be sure that he could make due with my lousy ability to take a decent picture.

anatomy of a space 1

In just over three months, I’ll pack my boxes and leave the 550 square feet that have been a refuge over these last two years. I’ll drive west to kentucky in a uhaul truck and unpack my boxes in something a bit more sprawling than this little studio in the middle of philadelphia. This city has tried me in so many ways. I’ve been yelled at, shoved, spit on, and nearly hit by a dozen taxis. I’ve found a deli where I can get a perfect egg and cheese on a bagel for $2.49 on Saturday mornings. I’ve sat on blanket in fitler square on august afternoons reading the new yorker and pretending that I wasn’t bothered by the horns honking and the dogs barking. I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit at my favorite yarn shop on south street because it’s been the one place--besides my studio--where I’ve felt truly at home.

And yet I realized this morning that I’ve done a poor job recording this actual space. For all my gestures toward limited square footage, I’ve not really documented its physicality here. I haven’t shown my tentative and temporary decor, the way that I’ve settled in only so much, knowing that I’d leave here before too long. But I want to be able to remember this space, the last in which I’ll live alone. And so here begins a small anatomical series to help me remember...and perhaps to help moderate my inclination years from now to romanticize this little box.



This is where I sit. In the mornings and the evenings and all day on the weekends. I bought this sofa from the previous tenant because it was cheap and neutral and the "good" couch went with J to kentucky. The side table and lamp were her's as well. I guess that means that this space is hardly my own. But J and I did buy the pillows when I first moved here. We went to a home decor shop and had this amazing afternoon with a flamboyant salesman who asked us "what story do you want to tell on your couch?" I kept laughing, but then totally embraced his inclination toward decorative narratives. We decided we wanted to tell a warm and autumnal story, and so we went with the reds and brown. The throw is a recent wedding gift from pals in Maine who must know my inclination to snuggle up.

The print on the wall--and I'll probably get this story wrong--is a rubbing from a Belgian church that my mom's childhood friend Greg made as a wedding gift for my parents in 1972. I've had it for a long time, though only recently have I really begun to look at it. This new seeing was mostly prompted by J's horror when we were rehanging it: "My god, that's the baby Jesus on your wall!" J doesn't take much interest in decor, at least not unless it strikes him as even vaguely christian, and thus somehow obliquely offensive to his occasional jewish self-righteousness. Jesus aside, though, I like the rubbing because it's so familiar. My Dad and grandfather made its frame and its back is a panel from a 1970's refrigerator box. Perhaps I should hang it backwards as a reminder of their inventiveness and frugality.


This is, obliviously, a close-up of the side table. Again, the lamp and table came from the pre-occupant. The rest is my own and not a particularly nice arrangement, but all its parts matter. The orchid that refuses to bloom again--though it seems perfectly happy--was a gift from my advisor, Eliza, after I passed my oral exams in 2006. I like to think of it as the one beautiful thing that came out of that experience, but it would make me far happier if I could coax it to send out a shoot of flowers. It's haphazard bowl I threw in 1994, before I went to college and during a summer in Michigan when I was fascinated by a christian scientist in my pottery class and apt to spend my free time flirting with lanky guy at a coffee shop who would become one of most important people in my life. The delicate yellow vase in the background is from my sister Molly's foray into raku. And then there's Arlo, looking forlorn, as he was usually did, and J and I on our wedding day. I still can't really look at pictures from the wedding without feeling somehow strangely nervous. But this one doesn't make me too dizzy.

So that's space one with more to come.