Just One Room

I've been redecorating my living room for many months now.  The process is nearing the end.  In two days my couch, chair, and ottoman will be delivered and then all the pieces will be here.  Just a matter of putting it all together and a couple of finishing touches. I've put a lot of planning, thought, and dollars into this project and I'm already pleased with it, even though the results are still mostly in my head. I have recurring daydreams of me curling up on my new couch and reading.

Yes, of course, I can read any place else.  And yes, I know that it's only a matter of time before I'll want to redo another room, but it's kind of a big deal for me and it's been a lot of fun.

There are nine other rooms in this house, a deck, a front porch, and a patio in the Garden of Many Groovy Things.  There is an every growing mini-orchard and veggie gardens and sun gardens and shade gardens and herb gardens and many big trees.  There is always tweaking to be done.  Always something that needs paint touched up or pictures rearranged or swept or vacuumed - you get the idea.  But the living room has been the one room that's been taking most of my thought and energy lately.

But it's just one room.   I've lived in several houses including a cabin on a ridge in Appalachia and an apartment on the north side of Chicago and lots of places in between.  Some were grander than others, some were older, one apartment was a very basic studio with the best roof-mate a person could imagine.  It was a tiny apartment and I only lived there for a couple of years, but it was a very big time.

I can imagine life as a room.  You enter it, decorate it, change it up, look out the windows, and eventually leave it.  Maybe you change the color of the walls.  Maybe the ceiling leaks.  Maybe the floor squeaks.  But it's just one room.  There are other rooms in other houses in other cities, states, countries. . . . heck probably even planets.

Sometimes we get all hung up on decorating that one room.  We can get so caught up in draperies that we forget to look out the window.  We get so ambitious about lamps and area rugs that we forget there is at least one door.  So if we knock a lamp over and it breaks or the carpet gets threadbare, we get all weirded out (that's a medical term, by the way) and panicky.  We forget that there are other rooms in the house.

Things happen.  Water flows downhill and shit stinks.  Rust never sleeps, yet the circle just keeps rolling.  There is always another room.  That's why the Universe installed doors.

I'm grateful.