Where I Lay My Head Down

It seems as if one should more easily fall into a river than out of one, doesn't it? But I've definitely been out of the River the last few days. I've had a lot of moments of noticing, and even of composing those moments into small stones in my head, but not so many moments of actually typing them out. Or of visiting other people, which I actually kind of feel worse about--I like the visiting in this project an awful lot.



For now, though, I'm actually not writing a small stone. Today I took pictures of my bedroom for the prompt over at Bella's 52 Photos Project. My bedroom has been slowly becoming a real room--that is, one with a coherent sort of feeling to it and a sense that someone might actually spend some time living in it. I've rarely had such a bedroom, actually, and it feels really nice to see this tiny room develop into a space with a spirit. I started out this morning trying to get just one good shot, but I ended up wandering in and out of the room through the day, taking pictures as I came and went from the house and noticed the light changing and moving across the room. (I'll spare you from looking at all of the 40 or 50 pictures I took, and even from looking at the 14 or so I actually edited.)

(And then poof! As if by magic, a curtain-y thing appears!)

The beautiful oak bed is with me on a long-term loan from my friend Jenny. It's her bed from childhood, and several years ago her dad shipped it out to her here in California from Philadelphia, our hometown. I remember sleeping in this bed in high school, when I would stay at her house, and I love that it's come to live with me. The mattress is high off the ground--higher than in a normal bed, since this one wasn't necessarily meant for a modern box spring--and even when I sit up, the headboard towers over me. The net effect is of being in a safe little boat, with some enormous, protective shield at my back. The other night, it was raining hard, and the wind was blowing all around my little house, and I lay in my warm bed reading and feeling as if nothing in the world could touch me.



What you can't see clearly in the above picture is that the horizon line is not actually flat--in better light, you can see the serrations of the Pacific Coast Range, west across the Central Valley. I love all the variation in that view, the way the weather comes over the hills from the coast; the way the sunset looks different every single night of the year. I've always loved driving north on the very road I now live on--the road just out this window and over the fence--because the light and the mountains are always so dynamic. And now I can sit right in the middle of my own bed and watch it all.

(Okay, maybe the pictures are a sort of stone for today.)