At Home

From the “Work in Progress” blog series

Note: This piece has been revised and is included in Chapter 3, “Stay with It, Box 4: Place/Peace,” Stay with Writing: Practices for Sustaining the Writer’s Work and Life. Sample of original blog included here. Artwork by Neil Freese.

Gale warning until Sun 9 PM. Rain 100% now through 10 PM

I hear it outside—rain, wind, a crash. Then my lights, clock, cable box, modem all shut down. I don’t like the diminished access.   

The wind pushes harder, and palm leaves bend, as if trying to touch the grass. Rainwater pouring from the roof is wet wind. It blows across the sliding door, flying away instead of splashing onto the ground. 

My focus is on how I feel, as if what I want or don’t want could have an impact on or might change the fact that at 9:49 AM my home feels like 5 PM. It’s overcast inside and colder than it is outside. 

I read Martin Gayford and David Hockney’s Spring Cannot be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy. 

With so many glass doors and large windows, this house is a livable greenhouse when the sun is bright. Now it’s more like being inside a light bulb turned off; a glass cloud cover darkens everything. 

I check my phone, battery 53%. I’ve taken 869 steps, about 11,131 less than usual, to get water, clean the cat box, brush my teeth, wipe the kitchen counter, find a sweatshirt. With no power and the riotous rain, the farthest I might walk the rest of the day is outside, under the eaves of the roof, to the recycling bin. 

I have a blanket and Alice, the cat, resting beside me. Every time I move, she jumps up and heads to her bowls  to check for food or water then to the atrium door—to confirm the weather outside--before she returns. I’d make tea, but I can’t heat water. I want to eat but want more to keep what is in the refrigerator cold (at least cool), so I don’t open the door. The  food in the freezer is already defrosting, so I take out ice cream and eat it with granola, then later eat it again with mixed nuts and more granola. 

It’s hard to settle. PG&E sends a text: crew expected onsite by 2:12 PM, 104 houses affected. It seems our neighborhood and a larger one just beyond us are involuntarily off the grid. 

Wind slaps against the house. It is louder than the rain, which is insistent but constrained. The wind chimes in the atrium make bumpy, irregular sounds.  I keep thinking the voice I hear from the other room is from the television, but it is only the storm in a conversation of its own. 

David Hockey says of La Grande Cour, his old farmhouse/studio in Normandy, “Right now, I need to be somewhere like this. When I signed the lease on Bridlington studio a decade ago I felt twenty years younger, and the same thing happened here. I feel revitalized. It’s given me a new lease on life.”

I have been procrastinating for a while. I have been making other “pictures,” to use a Hockney phrase for his work. I’ve been writing and revising scenes in another project and hoped something from the process would spark a new piece for this series. The insights I’m acquiring are ones I’m still integrating—new ideas on how a scene is a story and also much more, a moment and a story within a story—how to create knowing that? I couldn’t settle into that question or any other; I couldn’t initiate anything new. 

Then David Hockney helped me reconnect to the importance of feeling at home--being able to create a moment of home inside the body, inside the mind, in whatever space is available…