A room in this old house, holds history–

mine, yours ours and theirs.

This room is where I sleep nights;

it’s where I awaken each day to

slatted light from vertical blinds

that open to a window laden with

orange tree leaves and ripened

fruit, the color of the sun setting

on the Pacific not more than a mile

from this very room in this home.

 

Its cornflower blue walls contain

my thoughts and prayers, my

ujjayi breath, sometime despair.

This oaken floor steadies my

bare feet, wears my yoga mat,

including the cat on top who

skrick scratches her claws in it.

 

But it wasn’t always my cave;

it belonged to others before me.

Two nieces slept here, the last

who chose the wall colors, and

the one before who now sleeps

in my parents’ home, while they

sleep in mine now, in their room,

which used to be the play room

for loud television shows and toys

and kool aid colored couches for

friends to jump on and destroy.

 

And before that, it was the bedroom

my husband designed and had built

by a friend who charged too much and

stole his baby grand piano on pretext.

And before it was our bedroom, where

our children were conceived and I

labored in our big blue sunken jacuzzi

tub beneath the bay window and lime

stone tiles surrounding the midnight blue,

it was an office converted from a garage,

where his business began selling hardware,

which eventually turned to software and an

office elsewhere, which he sold to find

more fulfilling work, which he still seeks.

 

But when my parents moved in, we moved

the bed, desk, dresser, night table and lamps

into my room, the room I share with no one

except the dog, a few cats and the constant

turnstile traffic of inquirers and visitors living

in and outside the house, my room, the hub,

with its Picasso print of woman-dove face in

black and white, who resembles my oldest

daughter even though I bought that print

twenty years before her birth, and now that

she’s twenty herself, she tattooed that face

on her left arm, just like it appears on my

bedroom wall, above the hand painted

poster that asks, “Is there no way out of the

mind?”, purchased and overpriced by a

friend of my daughter’s who painted and

sold it to me after she returned from rehab.

 

And the Van Gogh with the gilt frame, huge

hanging above my bed, well that was a gift

from my nephew when he was only 23, and

he knew I loved art and so wrapped this big

old Starry Night print and gave it to me, so

that’s why it’s there framed above my head,

garish and cliché but sentimentally stationed.

 

Because my room holds pictures of my girls,

and a fan that cools me summers and a

heater that warms me winters, and dozens

of ceramic boxes and knick knacks and the

remains of my jewelry box, what wasn’t

stolen by someone who knew the dog

well enough not to get bitten as an intruder.

 

This room holds hours of frustration, and

ideas, poems and graded essays, years of

reading and writing, drawing, coloring and

crocheting, fretting and forgetting, crying

and laughing, the entire history of a house,

its inhabitants, furnishings, we call home.