Nesting Season

Today is May Day, the traditional European festival of spring and renewal. Yesterday, while I was out on my daily walk, two geese and five goslings paddled by. Today, under the eaves outside our bedroom window, a couple of Eastern Phoebes are hatching eggs. They’re domestic-looking birds, plump-bodied and unobtrusive in their brown and cream feathers, with sassy long tails. Even though we have to wash off our Adirondack chairs every time we want to sit on the back terrace – and even though the relentless cheeping of the chicks after they hatch drives us a little crazy – we enjoy their presence.

Inside, I’m nesting, too. Not literally – except maybe via Zoom and Facetime, which let me coo over an adorable new grandson. Figuratively, though – for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been slowly transforming my study into a writing nest.

While I was teaching, I often wrote syllabi and lectures in my study. But mostly I used it as a place to store stuff. There was an adequate printer, a sturdy oak computer table (my first purchase after a divorce thirty years ago), and a couple of cheap bookcases. On the shelves and floor lay messy piles of books to take back to the library, CDs to listen to while I worked, files with information on future trips, and collections of house plans for whatever kind of house had currently caught my fancy. Although the mess had a certain logic to it, it was definitely a mess. (Whenever my Marie-Kondo-nut of a husband knocked on the doorframe, I reminded him to avert his eyes.) Even after we returned from six weeks in Florence to mark our retirements, I tended to haul my laptop off to a local coffee shop and ignore the disarray. The prospect of tackling those piles of stuff made me vaguely anxious.

Now I’m suddenly spending a lot of time in my study. (I know that I’m lucky to have a room of my own. For years, this was a kid’s bedroom. My husband and I both worked at the dining room table.) Since I’d successfully organized the closet in my study a couple of weeks ago, I was emboldened to tackle the study itself.

I started with a small project: creating a space for journaling and staring dreamily (or moodily) out the window. All I had to do was reclaim a small desk, repair a broken leg with wood-glue and duct tape, and then shove it in front of the window. To the left, a printer cart became a place for my colored pencils; to the right, a filing cabinet became a shrine to faraway places dear to my heart.

This week I’ve been sorting out papers: some old writing projects (three unpublished novels, one uncompleted project on women’s spiritual memoirs), plus files – lots and lots of files. As you can imagine, this has been way more time-consuming than the closet. After all, files have to be opened and their contents examined – file by file, page by page. I tossed a lot of paper into the recycling bin. What remained, I sorted into labeled hanging files. (I’m a sucker for pretty new file folders.)

At that point I could no longer put off the emotionally complicated task I’d been avoiding: dealing with those novels. Looking at multiple drafts of a novel that never got published is a little like looking at pictures of yourself and old boyfriends at high school dances. It’s charming, it’s funny, it’s sad. It brings back memories of an earlier time. (Could that hairstyle really have been in vogue – ever? Was that the night he ran out of gas and we had to be rescued by his dad? And what was I thinking with that dress?)

I took a deep breath and decided I could manage re-reading one manuscript a week.  

This week I focused on my oldest novel, an epic-type fantasy I started writing in graduate school. (Writing the opening pages rescued me from a writing block in my academic work.) As I re-read scenes from that novel, I kept remembering the places I wrote particular snippets of dialogue (the diner near work, where I joked with other regulars and watched the morning sun spill down the street; the clatter of the comfortable coffee shop near my house). I recalled the fun I’d had inventing an elaborate, three-dimensional board game for a sophisticated and urban culture, a funeral service for a feudal one, a layout for a utopian settlement hidden in the mountains.

I will readily admit that it’s not a great novel, and to very few people’s taste but mine. But I loved writing it. And this week, I loved re-reading it. Although I’ve been more or less housebound, my imagination has been roaming in faraway countries and complex, imaginary cultures. With my troubled characters, I’ve galloped over grassy plains and threaded my way through high mountain passes. I’ve grieved with them, danced with them, and fallen in love alongside them. Just last week, I was wondering how, during this quiet time of the pandemic, I could experience my life as more vivid, rich, and intense. Here’s what I learned this week: if I want to see vividly and feel intensely, my imagination needs as much exercise as my body. Like everybody else I know, I need creativity, inspiration, and play. Even if I never publish a word, I need to write. 

Today my study is certainly prettier and better organized than it was two weeks ago. But pretty and organized don’t cut it when it comes to the heart: for my writing life, I need to nest in my imagination.