Notes from an Urban Cabin #1 - The irresistible phone grotto
It had me at phone grotto.
I had no interest in studio apartments. Too small, I thought. And is it a good idea to work, lounge, eat and sleep in the same room? But I was touring some apartments with a landlord, and this place was close. Why not take a look?
Well. Hardwood floors. Big windows. Architectural charm. Crystal doorknobs. A three-and-a-half-block walk to work. A 40 percent decrease in what I was spending on rent. And the phone grotto.
It's an arched cutout in the wall, a place of honor for the tall candlestick telephones people had back in the day. An ironic place to leave my iPhone at night. A ready-made tiny gallery space for changing exhibits. Just tall enough to accommodate my elementary school district-wide Spelling Bee Champion trophy.
I took possession of my urban cabin a week before the first round of moving in. I'd drive from my other home, park there in the morning, walk to work, walk back in the afternoon, open the windows, make tea, and read Anne of Green Gables in my camp chair for an hour. I camped out one night with foam mats and a sleeping bag.
This will force me to downsize, I thought! The biggest closet has boxes I haven't unpacked yet. I must not need that stuff. (Yet part of my rent savings is being spent on a 5-by-10 storage unit around the corner, and more stuff is insulating half a wall in the garage of friends.)
I've been fully here, fully moved out of the old place, for ten weeks now. Long enough to have people over for lunch, to host friends driving east for dinner and a friend driving west for a sleepover. Long enough to rearrange the furniture. Not long enough to unpack everything. Long enough to say "yes" to what someone asked me years ago when I first moved to Arkansas: "Do you know you're there yet?"
As I said in a Facebook post when I was thinking about starting this newsletter, "What I know is that since moving downtown, I am trying to root myself in this place. I'm trying to love on foot more. Well, that was a typo. I meant live on foot. But let it stand.
"And I want to know how other people do this in the places you live. And how you deal with the restlessness that seems to be part of wherever we live. If you have thoughts that might help me shape this, I'd like to hear them. But I'm going to start without really knowing where I'm going."
There will be reports from my daily walking. (For instance, I'm not normally an envious person, but at some point this summer when I saw the beautiful photos from yet another friend vacationing at the beach, I suddenly felt bereftly landlocked and dehydrated in spirit. Well. In my walking, I've noticed that at some street corners, in some gutters, there are small sand-drifts where there is no evidence of sand nearby. Where did it come from? I suspect that, just like the places where asphalt has broken away to show an old brick street underneath, these sand-drifts are evidence of ancient beach. Or maybe shaken from the sandals of travelers. I don't know. But there's something hopeful rather than untidy about it. Something that makes me want to step squarely in it and leave a shoeprint. And maybe, once, a bare footprint.)
There will sometimes be mentions of what I'm reading. Such as actual books, which I can hold in my hands and mark up with my pencil:
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard (more on this, and the fact that she was living in suburbia when she wrote it, in letter #2).
Finding Livelihood, Nancy J. Nordenson
Several Short Sentences About Writing, Verlyn Klinkenborg
And things found online or via email:
Lots at Brain Pickings, lots about walking. Like this.
Tweetspeak Poetry. Lots to stimulate creativity, lots of posts from people writing in place. And their new-poem-each-weekday Every Day Poems subscription, which is a well spent $5.99 each year.
Seth Haines' TinyLetter, which more than anyone else's helped me decide to give this a try.
If you're coming through Little Rock and want to stop for tea, talk, or some other sustenance, give me a heads up. I'll sweep up the cat hairs, stock some provisions or figure out a meal from what's on hand, and make a space at the table for you. Until then, thanks for coming to my table through this letter.
Peace,
Laura