Room Additions

Carmel-by-the-Sea, California

Share a little secret with you: I color-code my months. I've done it since college. What this means is, when I have a choice of colors (highlighting pens and ink color of other pens, kitchen sponges, file folders, etc.) I pick a color that corresponds to the month -- at least to me it does. Some months are obvious: October = orange. In the spring and summer I have to pick from the palette, but I worked this out years ago. See the Carmel-by-the-Sea above? September = blue. I'm not sure why. Maybe because I always had the blues when summer was coming to an end. Or maybe as the days shorten, I want more of that blue sky. But if you look again, you will see that the blue above is getting lighter and fainter. And my stay in Carmel is nearing its end. But, I'm not going to write about that. I'm going to write about . . . room additions.

Don't run and get the blueprints and the tool box yet. This construction is metaphorical. It started with something that I read in the newspaper recently, which reminded me of something my friend, Joan, had said about therapy. She said that engaging in the process of therapy allowed her to live in all of the rooms of her house. I knew exactly what she meant, because I have known people (and siblings) who could only live in one room, sometimes with the doors and windows fastened shut. Ending up much like Nanny Hawkins in Brideshead, Revisted, it's not unusual to slip into this as we age. Expanding and meeting challenges in life, even developing new interests can be daunting. But if you have a large, or even medium-sized house, who wants to hole up in only one room?

The genesis of the article was that marriages can suffer from one of the individuals adding on a room and denying the other access. You see this when someone develops a passion or interest which excludes their partner. So you get football and golf widows; or one person getting more devout in their religion while the other does not; or involvement in a book club and their fellow members to the detriment of the time spent together with your partner. But that's a relationship issue. What I was interested in was the concept of room additions as a metaphor for personal expansion. In recent years, I've found this concept of expanding your life, well, fascinating. I think because, in many ways, I was fearful when I was younger. And as that has dropped away, I've been able to push out in areas that are both healthy and gratifying to me, but, more importantly, this has given me more courage to push out in other areas.

I'm not going to make your eyes into pinwheels by reiterating my three-things mantra which is on the mission statement, if you will, of my blog. But I do want to attempt to convey just how important, how much it has changed my life to rediscover dance, to risk my fragile creative vulnerability by putting up my writing here, and to up the ante on a life-long culinary adventure by discovering more innovative ingredients and new trends in cooking. These are my room additions.

And btw on the marriage front, for those of you not following along, Billy cooks alongside me. I've even recently caught him perusing food magazines. He reads every post I write, and even accompanies me, albeit very occasionally, to salsa clubs. So, no locked doors on any of my room additions.

I really had to reign myself in to pick those three activities. I wanted to try to get better at them through concentration and practice. So I winnowed out all those other things that I had tried: calligraphy, knitting, baking (for the most part), though I do still garden. Book club? English majors don't do that. We did it with our professors and a whole room of other English majors all through upper division literature classes and senior seminars. No one is going to pick what I read right now, and I'm not much for the ubiquitous thriller/intrigue authors. But that's just me. Sports? I suppose I could revisit golf again, in spite of the carpel tunnel affecting both my hands -- that's why God made Advil. Art? My real weak link. I'm neither talented at visual art, nor interested in looking at it. I will walk through galleries with Billy, but I get nothing out of it. Art museums? I might as well be walking through Ikea. It's just something missing in me.

So if I were to begin to think about, let's see, bumping this wall out and adding a, let's say, small sunporch off the dining room, what would that room contain? And I paused for a long time before writing this list: volunteer work, most likely involved with reading/reading disabilities; studying Spanish (yet again) though I'm hopeless with languages; spending a month somewhere that isn't located in either California nor Hawaii; raising a puppy, but not yet. Before you start construction, you should have a pretty darned good idea of what you are doing. But, I also think it's a slippery slope where you get complacent about living in the quarters you already have, or worse, closing off some of those rooms.

I suppose the constant construction of room additions could also bring new relationships -- new friends. As my family dwindles, my friends have become even more important to me. They are truly my family. But they don't live together in the family room. They are spread out into different rooms all over my house -- my salsa friends in that room over there with the music and dance floor, for example. I am always open to welcoming new friends, but the friends I have carried through my life or at least through the last decade or so mean everything to me. You know who you are!

So there you have it! Room additions. And I don't want to get all new-agey about this, but it is interesting to ponder. If you were going to build on a new room, what would it represent and contain? How would you furnish it? I'm just asking . . . Gracias for reading my blog in whatever room in your casa.