Most cherished room

Yesterday I attended the last writing class of the current semester.  One of the pieces Janet distributed was published in The New Yorker a year ago, and I found it so fascinating that I had to reproduce it here.

THE ROOF
s	n	o	w	s	n	o	w	s	n	o	w
n	o	w	s	m	o	w	s	n	o	w
o	w	s	n	o	w	s	n	o	w
w	s	n	o	w	s	n	o	w
s	n	o	w	s	n	o	w
n	o	w	s	n	o	w
o	w	s	n	o	w
w	s	n	o	w
s	n	o	w
n	o	w
o	w
w

Cathal McCabe, The New Yorker, November 9, 2012

One of our in-class assignments was to write something about the place where we live. I had an idea almost immediately. I have tweaked it somewhat this morning, and here it is.

We bought our current house in late 1999. We had lived in a number of homes but none of them held a candle to this one. A friend of mine knew the owner and knew that we were looking for a house so we arranged to see it without an agent. It was an older home that had been extensively redone fewer than ten years earlier by that owner. From the moment we walked into the sun-filled living room, I knew immediately that we were in trouble, because it was above the price range we had set for ourselves. Somehow we made it work and we have lived here ever since.

Oddly, the place in the house that has come to mean the most to me was not one of the original selling points: not the living room with many windows and a beautiful cathedral ceiling with skylights, not the bathrooms in each of the three upstairs and one downstairs bedrooms, not the kitchen whose walls are primarily windows, not the room with the Jacuzzi and steam sauna, not the wall in the family room that looks like Jerusalem stone, not the second kitchen downstairs that is the dream of anyone who has prepared for Passover. The place that has meant the most to me, especially during the past two years, is a small room off the downstairs bedroom that we knew immediately would be a home office. A couple of years after we moved into the house, we had built-in desks, bookshelves, and file cabinets installed around the perimeter of the room to make it into a true home office. It is not a large room but we designed it so that we can both work there without bumping into each other.

My first memories of the room were before the built-ins were in place, when we had an old desk, an old table, and a few old bookshelves. The room served as “command central” for planning Dina and Aaron’s wedding. After the invitations went out, I would spend each evening updating my Excel spreadsheet with information from response cards that came in every day. Two years later it again served well for planning Simmie and Ronen’s wedding.  

As computers became more and more a part of both our work and personal lives, we found ourselves spending more and more time in that room. When my pulmonary function made it difficult to commute into Midtown Manhattan every day, I was able to put in a productive day “at work” without leaving the house. Over time, as Pfizer reorganized and I was working daily with colleagues who were literally scattered all over the world, from Shanghai to Milan, it mattered little whether I was in Manhattan, Riverdale, or Sharon as long as I had high speed internet access and a telephone. While my pulmonologist kept encouraging me to consider whether it was time to stop working, I was happy to be able to keep doing the work I loved.

When the chemotherapy shrunk the tumor in my brain sufficiently for me to be able to begin to focus again, I found myself spending more and more time back at my familiar desk. To spare my having to go up and down stairs, which taxed my breathing, energy, and balance, Barry had moved our clothing into the extra bedroom that is adjacent to the office, and moved enough utensils from the main kitchen so that we could eat our meals in the downstairs family room. It was six months before we finally moved back upstairs.

Because I was no longer able to perform my responsibilities in clinical research at Pfizer, the nature of my “work” changed, but the office has continued to serve me well. It is here I sit writing this blog, here I play my Lumosity games, and here that I have created the photo albums of our grandchildren. Sometimes I think about moving upstairs, where the large windows with southern exposure bring in bright sunlight. But I doubt I would ever be as comfortable as I am in this familiar space.

It is funny how what started as the low point, both figuratively and literally, became the real high point of my life in this house.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Love,

Rebecca