HeartSpace — Pennsylvania Edition
Books are our friend. But Nature is, too.
When I read Dennett’s piece on her favorite room:
I was reminded of me. Once upon a time, when my first marriage was over and I was living in my ex-wife’s guest room, I would have chats with friends on CompuServe¹ about where I wanted to be someday (as in, not sleeping on a futon for nine months while I tried to find a job during a recession). I envisioned a room—a library—with books along the walls and a nice comfy chair and a place to put my tea while I was reading. A room full of books! How could that not be wonderful!
My California apartment, once I got a job and moved out of my ex’s place, did not have space for a library. I compromised by buying shelves made with real wood² and furnishing my living room with the books that had been in storage while I got out of the Navy and got divorced. But I had a comfy chair and a place to put my tea! (Or wineglass. I found that also worked.)
My bachelor townhouse in Pennsylvania, where I moved a couple years later, was decent, but not large enough for a library. Still, the shelves worked great in the new living room, and I added more matching³ ones.
And then, I met this woman. Who also had lots of books. And when we went house-hunting, she could tell me where our shelves would go, because Deb has that kind of superpower. And so we ended up with our library.
So that’s where we spend our time, right?
Not so much.
A couple years ago, in anticipation of eventual retirement (fingers crossed), we had a four-season porch built to replace our deck. And (also in anticipation of retirement) had our backyard re-landscaped to include a stream and waterfalls. And this is our HeartSpace.
We watch our flowers bloom and our birds eat. We watch groundhogs try to reach our feeders and deer wander through the landscaping. We watch snow fall and leaves grow. We look up from our notepads and laptops and enjoy the day.
And sometimes we walk back inside the house, pull a book from our library shelves, and then head back out to our comfy chairs on our porch.
¹Yes, it was the early 1990s. Yes, it was via dial-up modem. Yes, we had phones, but you wouldn’t recognize them. Now hush, child, the grownups are talking.
²See, in the Navy, I got moved every few years by lowest-bidder moving companies who didn’t care what happened to my stuff. Plus a decent but not extravagant salary. So that meant particle board shelves that tended to disintegrate after two or three moves. Having real wood was like I’d died and gone to heaven.
³If the old ones are made of wood, and the new ones are made of wood, they match, yes?
