Streamlined. Uncluttered. Spare. Soothing. My blue bedroom seems empty, though it’s not — it’s a matter of comparison. In any of my four graduate school bedrooms, I had to push stacks of books aside to get into bed. I didn’t climb into bed as I do now — I fell over onto the single mattress on the floor, where I read, and then slept with Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton, Virginia Woolf, or Ralph Waldo Emerson.
My book-filled room was festooned with clothes that never made it to the closet, but formed layers on the back of my desk chair. My last grad school bedroom had a big closet, but instead of hanging up my clothes, I tacked up on the long wall all the rejection letters I got for college teaching jobs — I had a lot of wallpaper before I was hired to teach in Flint, Michigan.
Now I climb up into my queen’s bed and hang up my clothes, and most of my current reading is in a basket by my bed. I still sleep with a few of my books — right now I’m sharing a pillow with P. L. Travers, not the Mary Poppins books, but her essays on myth and story, What the Bee Knows.
My blue room has no closet, no dresser — just a pine armoire, a chair, a bedside table. No clutter. Colorful Chinese boxes are stacked on the armoire, but they’re empty. Up there is also my Chinese mud figure — he’s a traditional character, a protector — the ghost catcher. Only he and I know he holds a big sword behind his back. I like that, it’s good to have a secret weapon.
The blue of the walls is perfect — azure, cerulean, sky blue — I don’t know, but I haven’t repainted in twenty-five years. My east window often looks out toward blue — the sky above Cornell and East Hill, the Inlet reflecting the sky.
The prints on the walls are blue, too — the big one called Summer Ithaca, beyond the lake the hills fading back. And the little one of the lake from the fifth floor of the Johnson, a great vantage for blue. Above my bed, more blue — the robe of Jim Hardesty’s Kwan Yin of the Flowers, a portrait of my girl, the Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion. I like her there, she who hears the cries of the world.
I love going to bed in my room. Even though I live alone, I have a sense of shedding my effortful selves when I put my knee up to get into bed. I don’t have to be anybody — I’m done for the day. It’s tiring, being somebody. I’m glad I have my blue room, where I can put all that down.
