A room of one's own.

"...a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction..."

-Virginia Woolf, 1928


Well, I don't know about the money, but I do now have a room of my own.

After writing in my bedroom for the past nine months while my babysitter tends to my sweet baby a few hours a day and my preschooler is in preschool, I have lucked into a wonderful arrangement: what appears to be the boiler room of a 1890's Victorian in mid-town.

I cannot tell you how much I love my boiler room.

For one, it has two windows, one which actually opens and allows me to hear the nice hum of the cars and trucks passing by on 21st street. Not one of them stops and asks me for more milk. Or where their blankie is.

My little room has a kitchen table as my desk and all of the paintings I have that are too disturbing to be hung in a family home. The walls are taped with pictures of my husband and my two kids, in all of there beauty and humor; they are also a gallery of my children's art: in fact, just today my four-year old handed me the "art project" she had just completed in her room moments before. She bequeathed it to me while still in her pajamas, a one inch by two inch piece of yellow markered paper - a pair of sunglasses, she explained.

"Mama, you can take it to work if you like, then you can look at them and think of me all day, every time you look at them."

I am looking at them now, Reese and am thinking of you, and so grateful I have the luck and priviledge to have a "room of my own" in which to work and dream and write, to make money for our home, to create my stories, to write my various clients' pieces which will help them sell more washers, or trips to the mall, or shows on TV. Because this keeps our poor, struggling economy going. And the words- they keep me going.

And for you Reese, for you and your brother and your Dad, for being the ones I get to come home to.

For all of this, I am grateful.

And for every woman out there who dreams of a tiny little space of her own, to house her dreams, to create her vision, to have a few moments of selfishness: you are welcome here in my boiler room anytime.

Bring snacks.