You’d go to open a closet door and discover another door you’d simply never noticed, but that had been there all along. And when you opened it…. wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, an entire empty room, a box of light and space and possibilities. All for you.
There’s actually an entire empty 5-bedroom apartment “all the way uptown” that I’ve Tessered to many times in dreams. The building’s kinda grim, but the space! It’s hard to choose which rooms I want for myself, there are so many. And I thrift shabby-chic wooden furniture and cushions in vivid colors, and buy an overflow of plants to make it a bohemian sanctuary.
If you take the dream train past the north-western-most limits of Manhattan, there’s another building that’s mine. Kind of a semi-detached town house. I’ve never been inside, but I keep remembering that it’s there if I need it, and that the train back into the city takes me right past that theatre where I have tickets to see that play…
Now that I live in a wildly sprawling one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles with nary an air-shaft in sight, I have the dream much less frequently. But last week I was reminded of it during a sudden-onset cleaning frenzy on the upstairs balcony. Yes, we have two balconies. I feel a reluctance to say that, because it seems so grand, and because I could evidently do with going back into therapy, but. Ahem. The upstairs one was… not grand.
We’d inherited a tall, paint splattered easel when we moved in, which we kept up there because it looked artsy as hell. Then, during a lull, Steven suddenly became this amazing painter and craftsman, building a custom easel, making the wooden frames, stretching his own oversized canvases, crafting decorative walnut frames for display. The upstairs balcony seemed like Picasso’s Paris apartment, but sun-drenched, and with a handsome Scot in his dedicated painting clothes. Abstracts sprung from walls, extra canvases filled the loft.
When eventually the lull ended, the table saw went into a weather-tight storage box, which was nearly visible under the pile of wood scraps and other vestiges of a brief and glorious painting residency. That was years ago. And sticky, salty dust piles up fast when it’s blown in from the beach all day, every day - and it never rains.
My less preferred succulents got migrated upstairs to join the wood pile. Some planter boxes that had held herbs that died almost immediately in the constant abrading sea-breeze sat quietly falling apart, excelling at slowly releasing their soil and gravel onto the balcony floor. The balcony door rusted almost all the way shut for a few years, but even when it was repaired, why bother? The downstairs balcony has a table and chairs, and a gas grill, and my favorite succulents. So that is where we went. When we went. You’d be surprised how chilly it is in Venice.
Then inexplicably, on Memorial Day, I looked at it all and thought - Now. I'm going to do it now. And after much less time and effort (although just as much dirt) as I’d anticipated, everything but the teak planks we’d also inherited, the artsy easels, and the actually attractive plants were gone. I swept up dustpan upon dustpan of sand and other things I didn’t examine too closely. I thought - I bet a potted olive tree could survive out here, and wouldn’t it look lovely through the window from downstairs. I got a beach chair out of storage and sat out there listening to the audiobook of A Wrinkle in Time.
The transformation isn't completely done. It needs another good sweep, and I need to get my hands on the weatherproof paint for the floor. (Picasso left a bit of a Pollock behind.) Plus, there’s a mostly dead cockroach that I discovered between two of the pieces of teak, and I don’t know how long it will take me to gather the courage to deal with it. But still. I have a brand new room. A surprise extra space. It had been there all along, waiting until I needed it.
p.s. It took 13 days to face the cockroach. Mercifully, by then, it had died. A species first, I believe.
