A Change in Setting

My writing table is cleared but for a box of Puffs tissues, a Moleskine calendar, a short stack of books headed for donation, a small notebook, the laptop, and a few papers—one of which is a choral reading Iv’e drafted for Christmas. All my books are in boxes stacked down the hall. The bookshelves stand against the walls all around me and yawn blankly like elderly men who’ve lost their teeth. The walls, which last weekend held art, diplomas, and framed mementos, are bare. Punctured here and there, the shock of their neutral floor to ceiling expanse waxes cold and clinical.

When I turn on my desk lamps the clicks echos in the room, hollow and tinny. The only other furniture is the black printer sitting atop the black two-drawer filing cabinet under the window. The lamp and the unabridged dictionary, these that shared the printer’s side table, have abandoned it. As has the table. The printer sleeps, its home button dimmed and dreaming.

My next study will be different. It will have a character all its own. It will be a different place. It will see different memories. This study has been a good study. It was in here that I typed my first novel. It was in here that I had false starts on a half-dozen more. I retired to this room to browse the shelves countless evenings after a frustrating and stressful day at the office. I paused from my writing to look out across the patio at tomato plants and brewing snowstorms. I sat with my first grandchild at this table while she scribbled in my journal. Pet cats, now gone, have walked across its surface. And an elderly puggle has slept under it.

I suppose this small fourth bedroom, that has been my study, will become again a bedroom. I imagine a child will again sleep in here as my child once did. And this room will become another person’s place, a room from which they too will go out into the world, and a room to which they too will return to be refreshed, rested, revived. I pass this room on to the next inhabitant. It is a good room. May it serve you well.