Places I’ve Written
Sunday, November 30th, 2008
Sunken eight feet or so in the ground, the view from the window where I write is comprised by a ringed retainer wall and a three-foot open space that lets in soft light. Today, the elements are falling through the small clearing and into view. Freezing rain and big snow flakes fall past the few overhanging arms of bushes and the stray brown stems clawing like dead hands from the flower garden along the side of the house. Whatever the weather might be outside, the window is always a source of light in the basement, yet, without viewing the sky directly the sunny days can be told from those that are are overcast. Sometimes, the ear can tell if there’s precipitation outside – the drops fall on the little gravel that’s been tossed on the bare spit in the window well.
There are other views more beautiful and the natural assumption is that the writing by such windows would also be more beautiful. I tend to agree, but I’ve hopefully written some eloquent pieces with this limited view, driven by internal inspiration not drawn from any particular sight or sound that surrounds me. Handheld devices have allowed me to update this site while roaming and writing bits of sentences at the park, at the playground, in hotel rooms overlooking the Capitol Dome and on the Vegas Strip, in the living room while sipping coffee and on the front porch swing in mid-summer when the hanging baskets are bursting red and the slotted wood floorboards and the white-painted porch fence feels about as American as it can be.
But I have written in some beautiful places. I have been inspired by views. On my honeymoon, I lay on the beach in Kuaiu and wrote in a fresh journal about the signifance of reading Exodus and its story about the people of the world being begot and begot and begot as the continual waves deposited new shells on the beach and pulled sand away from the shore. The little green bedside bible never made its way to the beach with me, though, and on the opening page, I lament that decision, then go on to describe the scene. I still have the notebook on an upper shelf in my closet. Here’s an excerpt of how I saw the world at 24:
The sun sneaks behind a cloud and I see a little boy – maybe not that little, 11 – throwing a handful of sand. The sand is much finer here that anywhere in the contiguous states. Milleniums of water have shaped and softened each grain. It feels like powder. From the tops of the beach chair, you need only move your hand a few inches and you can feel the knakhi colored powder freckled with white grains. I can see the cabana boys at the end of the beach starting a fire at the butt of a long golf cart. I can’t see what they are burning. The smoke is rising up through the palm trees and drifitng toward a row of multi-leveled houses built into a hillside that looks over 50 feet of trees right beneath their patios, then water. The water on Kalipaki Beach in Kuai is brown and carries a lot of sand. On the flight in, we saw pockets of bright blue water. Those same pockets formed jagged edges where the dark water around it tried to intrude. The smoke is beginning to take on the sweet smell of fish or pork.Two men now sit at a table, legs crossed, ballcaps on, the golf cart moved back into the shade of the palms. A helicopter probably on a tour chops overhead in the 10-minutes-till-9-a.m. sky and draws our attention upward. A cloud-shaped heart catches Betsy’s eye. Maybe the atmosphere is picking up the vibe from the honeymooners and the couples wanting to regain their love hoping the exotic location will help.
Before we were married, my wife and I lived in a small Cape Cod-style house off the historic town square in Liberty, Mo. That first summer I met her she kept the windows propped open with rulers that were a tip off to her employment as a second grade teacher. On the second floor on the north side of the house there was a bedroom overlooking a strange neighborhood garden. Missouri Street was full of well-groomed houses and some older ones that had been poorly maintained.
Amid the houses, though, there was a large open field about 50 yards by 50 yards that had been terraced and planeted with flowers. In the soft grown you could find everything from yucas and snap dragons, to tulips and Chrysanthemums. They were so healthy they had to be continually maintained though I never saw such a person. The gardener was probably a neighbor – a retiree – who came and worked over the ground with a trellis during the day while we were away.
I wrote by the window overlooking all this on occasion in some long forgotten spiral notebook and sometimes on the font porch that had been eaten through by termites. I proposed to my wife in that house on a Sunday night in a bedroom that had been made over into a dining room. Before I moved in, she’d taken down the bedroom doors off the hinges in that room so that it became an open space you could walk into directly from the foyer or the adjoining kitchen. Pushed up against the wall, there was a stereo that I’d listen to in the shower before heading to my job at a small newpaper in town. I drew about as much inspiration from the warm shower and Jackson Browne’s The Pretender as I did the view, but it was a different sort of inspiration. I guess you could call it energy.
That house had no basement to write in, but the first floor was essentially built into a hillside. The view from the bathroom window and the living room on the northside was a chainlink fence holding back a dirt wall. There was a desk and chair upstairs, which made it the perfect place to write.
My job at the time involved driving to the neighboring county to cover commission meetings and downtown to cover city hall. I was paid little for the work that involved writing 5-10 stories a week, editing article from freelancers, taking photos and laying out the entire newspaper. I essentially was operating my own independent newspaper with the exception of ad sales. I came to see that little house as my refuge. On Thursday afternoons, when the commission meetings got out early, I’d pull my car up behind the house near its ancient garage, and spend the afternoon reading or writing. I didn’t do as much writing as I wanted, though, given that my job was pretty tiresome and I’d spent most of the day writing.
But I felt removed from it all there, sort of like a writer’s cabin deep in the woods. We celebrated New Year’s and the new millenium with a small dinner _ just the two of us – and the doors locked tight. We didn’t know what to expect, if the Y2K threat was real and suddenly our bank accounts would be blanked (not a big issue because we were flat broke) or the missle silos would suddenly let the missiles in their bellies free. We were just off the hostoric square, not far from a small restaraunt, a greasy spoon, a bookstore and our bank. We had almost everything we needed in walking distance and it was a poster on a jewelry store window that convinced me to start looking for diamonds.
Once I sat on the front porch and read a short story by Orwell that I found in one of Betsy’s old English canons from college. She’d walked up the street with a friend that afternoon to the city’s annual autumn festival. Later that year we hung Christmas lights on the low-lying eaves. We could look out on the crisp December snow from windows that had settled into the walls at odd angles.
The next two houses that we lived in and actually owned were not conducive to writing at all. The first was a 1950s ranch house with a tiled basement that appeared as though it hadn’t been updated since the house was built. The tiles were white and what I would call bowling-alley green/blue with black flecks throughout and they layered the room where the computer terminal was set up. There were no windows to write by at all down there – just a musty old shower stall and a half-bar set up. In that house, I actually wrote very little. I chose to write on my lunch hour at work, either secretly writing and saving Word docs on my desktop or writing on a notebook or a handful of paper I grabbed before heading out the door at noon.
The second was a California split level that was actually in a pretty neighborhood, but I was working two jobs at the time and wrote predominantly away from the house. I wrote part of one of my favorite pieces, though, while sitting at the kitchen table. It was about my daughter talking herself to sleep just before Christmas with the Nutcracker Suite playing in the background. I wrote about the visions she must have of being a ballet dancer or whatever she wanted to be for that matter and the changes our family had gone through in that house. We’d welcomed my son into the family a few months before I wrote those words and described how we moved about the halls and was less reliant on supproting himself on various objects.
And, now it’s almost Christmas again and the season’s first snow is layering the ground. Maybe I’ll write about it tomorrow. If I could see it from here, I bet it would be a beautifully written piece.
