Room of Her Own

Was it Betty Friedan who said that a woman needs a room of her own? If memory serves, 1990, University Colorado, Boulder, Women's Studies class. I'm midway back but I may as well be in the front seat, all those internal questions blazing.

That was also the year that I went to my first women's bookstore, Bangalore, India. Down a tight alley, up the back stairs, nondescript door, but inside! Women stretched out, saris across the floor, smoking beeties, reading books that were not found anywhere else in that town, probably not in a thousand square miles. Hand-painted pages of a woman jumping into a well, and I tremble a bit, so nervous to be white, and in such an important room, every other woman peering above book edges to stare in my direction. I walked out with Audre Lorde's Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, that thoroughly changed my life on the train between Madras and Delhi.

Through the rain again, I find my way to the current coffeehouse that poses as my office. Enough elements pass the test to make it just conducive for writing, though I still waste more time than not. This morning, under a blaring speaker of music, I stay because it's the only table near an outlet. Alas. My next project is a guide book of all the Portland coffeehouse/cafes that are good for writing....or not. Mostly not. Could write one for the Bay Area, too. Which is sort of sad. And I blame it on Boulder.


My mom died when I was nineteen and my siblings were much older with families of their own. My father remarried right away and I was not so welcome. The coffee house became my home. More than twenty years down the road and it's a hard habit to break.

But it's time. I need a space of my own. That's my vision today. Creative office space, close to other creative folk, yummy and comfortable, room for a group, room for friends to work, too. A place where I can, once again, create a healing space for those who want to come and sit, where together we will work it out, find the center of the trail again, wonder at what we notice as we walk.

It's a place where I can go after I put River to sleep. Where I don't mind driving to because I see myself so thoroughly in the wall color that poems start spilling before I fully turn the lock.