The Creativity Room

The room I spent my childhood in was something I call the creativity room.

My bedroom? No.
It was the one with the piano…and many other things.

This was a collage of resources and creative efforts, serving as a “sewing room” for my mom, who sews and knits various blankets for newborns and constructs dozens of other useful items as Christmas and birthday gifts.

The dark-stained wooden door was never an ominous entry, since it was always open, leading into a naturally-lit room. At the back corner of our house, it had the advantage of windows on two sides: one of those being a sliding-glass door. The top half of the walls was painted a modest egg white, and the other half was paneled by rugged, splintery old barn wood, salvaged from an old building on our property. My mom asked for that wood to be used in her sewing room, loving the country-home feel it added to the already remote location of their home.

The wooden paneling was the white elephant of the room, for me.

It was the one thing that could scare me from the room.

Who puts old, unfinished wood in their house? No one else I knew, that’s for sure.

My active imagination kept bugs, spiders and other creepy-crawlies pouring out of the walls. The lure of my sheet music and sewing projects outweighed my fear everytime.

In my efforts to clear my mind of worry, one day I touched the wall, attempting to convince myself of my imagination’s absurdity. Out of the porous wood came a spider, defensively scuttling across his territory. Out of my lips the blood-curdling scream.

It was the beginning of battles in years to come.

Did I want to play piano? Yes.

How bad? Bad enough to keep heavy shoes around, suck up my inferiority and kill arachnids the moment they were spotted.

Attack and defense. Invasion and repulsion.

The first wall hanging you notice is small—a piece of embroidered work (about the same dimensions of notebook paper) with a saying over a family of bears dressed in human clothing, and shackled with a thin baby-blue frame, white matting. The momma bear wears a bow, daddy bear wears trousers and glasses, accompanied by a toddler and a baby stroller.

I don’t remember the embroidered phrase exactly, but that was never the point.

It was about home and family, the kind of thing that makes you feel safe, even if you want to hate those bears. The type of thing that reminds me of the fourth grade—the feeling of security in things that have always been there, that you had yet to question--like wearing cotton dresses to church and immediately donning your wall calendar with the dates of vacation bible school. It’s the kind of comfort I used to get from listening to Dr. Vernon McGee’s voice on the crackly waves of an A.M. channel. You ingest it, whether you listen to it or not, and you’re filled with peace.

In the corner of the corner of our mysterious house was a large print of a nature scene: a tall sanctuary of forest full of spring-green foliage and a deer and her fawn, newly freckled. The immensely tall trees lend an unearthly sense of spaciousness. A spaciousness that sickens even children by the meager comparison of the squashed confines of existence.

Despite the unworldly spaciousness, the deer seem trapped in fear, which always convicted me with worry that they were in the same plot as Bambi and his mother. It never failed to leave me uneasy, this utopia with beautiful, sweet-looking animals where fear resided. It seemed busy in its dire emotion, full of things, but with very little clutter.

It was a sanctuary that’s been tainted, one from which they have to flee. My fox-and-hound sort of worry knew there must be a lot of love there, in that painting, but that it didn’t matter on a certain level.

A child discovering the tragedy of nature, the tragedy of reality.

Even still, it was my favorite thing to look at in the room. The anxiety spurred me into narrative, where I could get out of the picture of my life, or take the deer away from danger. My imagination found solace in the meditation of walking through a perfect, quiet woods where only the crackle of twigs and the gushing of streams could drown out the rest of the busy world. A place of escape and contentment.

And then, there was the Piano.

The Piano, my world.

An upright, cherry wood Rudolph Wurlitzer—the love of my young life.
In the early years, it was racked with hymnals, dozens of easy-level books and as much pop sheet music as you could imagine. Karoke machine not far from it, it was my station of long afternoons in the country.

A symbol of curiosity, through which I thought I could learn about my mom.

A teacher, wife, mother, her only other love was piano. Her consuming desire to be an efficient, not even great, pianist left me with the biggest puzzle of all. What is the allure here?

I spent so much time trying to figure that out, that I never returned from the journey.

Piano, my comfort, my friend that would be there waiting for my return from gossipy teenagers and shallow, self-absorbed tweens. A major source to instill organizing, planning and dedication to my system. Imagine your biggest challenge and the most fun you’ve ever had. Then combine the two.

It was always flooded with bits of paper scattered on the bench and stacks of other music. This was my scatter-brained songwriting in informal music speak. The type that drove my piano teacher nuts because it wasn’t quite jazz, wasn’t quite classical and worst of all, she couldn’t even read it…she had to trust me and listen to it played.

The Piano.

It was the part of the room that felt like mine. I would scrape off mom’s music and try to remove the stereo, to clear it off like a performance tool. I spent hours there, much more than mom did, and certainly more than dad. Upon each return, all the clutter would magically return to the piano, as if it was a mere bookshelf or closet, and my work would begin again.

Near to the piano hung a photo of my twin nephews wearing sailor-type outfits at age three. For a short time, my nephews lived with us when I was seven and they were five. Coming from a child that was so isolated by age gap to her siblings, I’d always begged my parents for a younger sibling. The six months of living with my nephews was a brief answer to that prayer.

We fought together.
Called each other names.
Built forts and fought more if territorial lines were crossed.

It was fabulous.

Saturday mornings were spent slathering mickey-mouse-shaped pancakes in real butter and granulated sugar before my mother turned us loose, not to return to the house until the next meal.

Watching Aladdin was our rainy day reflex, coloring and drawing on scrap paper over the linoleum floor was part of our daily agenda and running across hay bales took an inordinate amount of time.

All of these things spring to mind, the endearing, weathered, dog-eared pages of my childhood in the days before my nephews moved away.

Creaky, crackly yellow blinds were just above mom’s 1970s sewing machine, suspended by way of a dirty white rope wrapped around a metal peg on the window sill. Whole months, whole seasons would pass before I would see them unrolled, in use. Conscious reminders of nights when dad was gone to Missouri to see his family, or gone fishing. These were the nights when mom wouldn’t sleep and instead would sew multiple projects in our creativity room, bidding her time until her hero returned.

The suspended blinds were marginally present on rainy afternoons of childhood, twirling the dirty white rope around short fingers, nose pressed against the glass, mentally judging how long the backyard basketball “court” dried or how long I had to wait before lying in the grass again.

The glory days of the sliding glass door the few years that we had an above ground pool. 1998 echoes of the sleekness of having no screen, of slipping out onto the deck for some on-the-go tanning before jumping into the pool only when visitors came and discipline relaxed.

It’s now a foggy-glass door, peeling, cracking, rarely used.

Warped brown and mustard-colored linoleum goes easy on the bare feet of the young pianists of the room. Worn from years of plopping down a soft grid for cutting fabric, piecing patterns, placing pins. This is where I tossed, then joined my printing paper by lying belly-to-floor and learned to write a printed “A” properly. It’s where I memorized my home address. It’s where I embarked on the journey of music by first drawing an outline of my hands and numbered the fingers. Music by numbers.

Here was the only time in my life that I found a wooden car with a potted plant in it as a threatening thing. Rolling unsteadily on the linoleum, my uneasiness came from the threat of bugs crawling out after watering it. The rarity of this event never seemed to calm my fears, somehow.

As a reformed bedroom, the creativity room actually had a closet. A vintage affair, the wooden-washboard panels opened to the most chaotic assembly of fabrics and half-finished clothing projects, illuminated by a lightbulb on a string.

Enter at your own risk.

Enter for a dip into the pool of possibility.

Squeezed into the least interesting corner of the room was the family ironing board, used mainly for everyone’s least favorite chore--ironing Dad’s handkerchiefs, but also riddled with an overwhelming stack of button-up shirts and mom’s dresses.

The only sense of wonder the ironing board could provide was its location under my mom’s personal corkboard, smothered with greeting cards and the only pictures of my her family that she owns. The elusive other family that I didn’t know well, staring at me while I starched shirts.

The room wore a dark-wooden clock with gold numbers, which struck some odd sort of fear in me, after having been abruptly shaken one day by its presence and intuitively prayed for someone at the hour of their death. A death unknown to me at the time.

The hung plaque nearby only added to that fear, with Ephesians threat or promise, “there’s a time to live, a time to die.”

The thin, golden hand ticked, ticked, ticked over the dark wood.

Ticking, mortally.

It ticked, ticked, stopped.