Just Write {2}: Our Bedroom

I’m sitting on the foot of our bed with my laptop and a library book. I have about an hour to kill while I hide from the TV downstairs. My husband is watching one of two shows he records that I can’t be in the same room as. One because it is too violent. I had to draw the line when I saw brain chunks on the sidewalk during a typical episode. The other is too scary. I have an extremely active imagination and an already complicated relationship with sleep. Anything that makes it more difficult for me to fall or stay asleep has to go.

I hide out in our bedroom with the electric fireplace running so that it covers the sounds that carry so well up the stairs. Usually I read, but sometimes I pay bills or play Candy Crush. Tonight I’m just writing. I do a lot of “just writing” in my notebook. I've already written at least 5 pages in it today. But rarely do I write anything in our bedroom.

I painted the walls yellow when I first bought the house, before I started dating my husband. The carpet is dark brown, and although it desperately needs to be replaced, I enjoy the combination of colors. It makes me think of brown-eyed susans, which I love. I should get some for the yard. There are flowers in a painting between the windows, but not brown-eyed susans. The flowers were painted by my grandfather. I have his artwork in almost every room in the house. There are more flowers on the glass lamp that I got from my great aunt’s house after she passed away and before it was sold as is, contents included. Over the bed hangs a plywood moon with stairs and a star with an empty shelf. It hung over my father's bed when he was a boy. I thought it was something he and or his father had made, but I recently saw something very similar at an antique show. The small shelf always held a ceramic deer, but when my parents moved it from my bedroom at their house to this bedroom, the deer stayed with my dad. I haven’t found anything I would consider replacing it with.

I love being able to look around the room and feel so many connections to my family and to our shared past. There is, of course, even more history in this room than can be seen with one’s eyes. There are nights when I stood soaked in pee by my father’s bedside until he woke, slipped off my wet pajamas, and pulled me into bed with him and my mom. There are the times my sister and I laid on the waterbed as teens, one on each side of my mom, just talking and laughing. Dog pee that we tried to cover with perfume. An escaped finch recaptured in the cup of my mom’s brassiere.

There are no photos displayed in the room, nor is there a TV. My rules. Not my husband’s. Every now and again he pitches for a TV, but I hold firm. TV watching can be done downstairs in the living room. Where he is now, and where I will return to shortly. After he goes to bed I will watch my soap opera. I don’t subject him to such nonsense.

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This is my second installment of Just Write, "an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments." You can read about this project at The Extraordinary Ordinary. If you decide to participate, you can link up on Heather's post from yesterday. You can read my first installment here.