wordless wednesday in which we have established writing studio 5.0

….”writing studio”…. I use the term loosely

house hunting, no metaphor intended

Chartwell House, home to Sir Winston Churchill. Public domain from wikimedia.

Reader, I’ve been house hunting. I confess, I hate house hunting, mainly because I’ve had to do it way too many times. Also because it takes time away from what I’d rather be doing like writing poems and taking naps. Alas, the lease won’t last forever and the time has come to dip our toes in the churning water of the Silicon Valley housing market.

One thing I hate about house hunting is that the houses are always trying to trick you. Yes, you’re sure that if you buy the low-slung modernist house you’ll soon be wearing thigh-high boots and a funky haircut. Or over there, in the cottage that’s practically swallowed by a jumble of a garden, you just know you’ll become a green thumb overnight and tame that beast of a garden so that it’s lovely again. And the house with all the fruit trees and the huge (by California standards) kitchen? For sure you’re going to whip out your apron and canning jars and put up a bunch of marmalade and lemon curd.

Or not.

At least I’ve done this enough to know that, in our price range anyway, no house is perfect, and no house will make me into someone I’m not. Those thigh-high boots?  Never gonna happen.

But is it wrong to have my top priority be a writing nook, corner, room, shed, or other set-aside space for writing? Yeah, probably.

Winston Churchill said something along the lines of: We shape our dwellings and thereafter our dwellings shape us. I think that’s probably true if you live in a place like Chartwell House (photo above), or if you live on a patch of land that has been in your family for three generations, or somesuch. In my life here’s how it has worked: We buy our dwelling, then something drastic changes and we sell our dwelling.

I’m not complaining. It’s a pretty lucky position to be in: to be thinking about buying a house. And my past home-buying and home-selling experiences have taught me to be a critical and detached viewer of potential homes. I know that any house will have things we like and things we don’t. Something will always need fixing. It won’t feel like home at first. We will sometimes wish we’d never bought it. Then one day, after enough living has taken place there, we’ll realize we’d be sad to leave it. This time, I hope that day is way off in the future.

And I’m still hoping for a writing spot wherever we end up (something tells me Sir Winston Churchill had plenty of those). Reader, do you have a spot where you go to do something you love — write, read, create, sew? Do you have a room of your own (literal or figurative)? I always like to hear about other people’s sanctuaries. If you like, tell us about yours in comments. Right now mine looks like this, pretty cozy, no complaints: