When I was a little girl, I would sit beneath my window and hum stories into the air. I would write words in a melody that floated away on my breath, freed from the swirling, ruminating trap of my mind. I had no concept of audience, no fleeting fear of how my story might be received. It was just a simple truth that the story must be told; the walls of my bedroom layered with the joys and tragedies of a ten-year old imagination.
My bedroom was my kingdom, my hiding place. My bed had been passed down to me by my mother from her days in college. I liked to picture it in her dorm room, pressed up against the corner where she would curl up, biting into her pencil as she wrote a term paper or crying into the pillow after an argument with her boyfriend. She told me once in passing that my grandfather had built the bed for her as a going away gift for college. This precious slip of information sent me scurrying to my room where I traced the finished, painted wood with new eyes and memorized the moldings with my fingertips. What thrill to know that I possessed this overt display of my grandfather’s love for his child. A rare, subtle surfacing of expression for a man who owned my heart utterly.
I liked to imagine why he chose to build the bed. What inspired him to give her a bookshelf instead of a headboard to lay benath each night? Did he think that books might bring her comfort when she felt far from home? Did he imagine that his granddaughter might one day run her fingers along the spines of her favorite novels to soothe her in the dark when she couldn’t sleep? Did he build this bed to cradle her each night while she sang stories into the folds of her sheets?
My bedroom was my kingdom, my hiding place. My bed had been passed down to me by my mother from her days in college. I liked to picture it in her dorm room, pressed up against the corner where she would curl up, biting into her pencil as she wrote a term paper or crying into the pillow after an argument with her boyfriend. She told me once in passing that my grandfather had built the bed for her as a going away gift for college. This precious slip of information sent me scurrying to my room where I traced the finished, painted wood with new eyes and memorized the moldings with my fingertips. What thrill to know that I possessed this overt display of my grandfather’s love for his child. A rare, subtle surfacing of expression for a man who owned my heart utterly.
I liked to imagine why he chose to build the bed. What inspired him to give her a bookshelf instead of a headboard to lay benath each night? Did he think that books might bring her comfort when she felt far from home? Did he imagine that his granddaughter might one day run her fingers along the spines of her favorite novels to soothe her in the dark when she couldn’t sleep? Did he build this bed to cradle her each night while she sang stories into the folds of her sheets?
1 comment:
I do not wish to express false praise, nor do I need too. You write excellently, descriptively, and expression-ally well.
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