It’s been hot and dry lately and today was no exception. My wife was out of town, our daughter was working her afternoon/evening shift, and I was home working on the exterior windows of our house. As usual, it involved scraping, slicing, picking, and power sanding with 40 grit sanding disks on the sashes and sills. 40 grit removes paint quickly and if I stop paying attention will change the shape of the wood in seconds too. I was feeling a bit low after lunch. Maybe it was my exhausting news feed.
Most of the time though, the Remain in Light album is the answer to everything, so, I tapped the icon, inserted my ear buds, climbed the ladder and started to grind. I quickly got into a physical groove and began to feel better. Five feet off the ground and a couple of songs in, I was suddenly transported to my second studio apartment in Providence. It was in a three-story brick house that had been modestly grand in 1870. By the time I lived there, one hundred-fifteen years later, it’d fallen into disrepair and was subdivided into eight apartments. Each apartment included a beautiful architectural detail that made it interesting, and a constant parade of mice and cockroaches which made the place feel like Federalist Grunge.
While I stripped the wood creating a big, hazy cloud of paint and wood dust, I was also standing on a parquet wood floor, behind my desk chair, facing my drafting table with pages of writing on yellow legal pads, walls covered with sheets of tracing paper, filled with notes, grids, icons, and images. The afternoon light streamed in from the Palladian window, which lit up an eight-foot freestanding Doric column behind me, painted in mint blue with a white base and capital.
Sometimes then and now is all right now. Whether I’m on a ladder here, or standing in an apartment there.
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“Daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity.” Gaston Bachelard–The Poetics of Space
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Songs :: Take Me To The River, Making Flippy Floppy, and the entire Remain In Light album by Talking Heads, More Than This by Roxy Music, Rebel Rebel by David Bowie, Legendary Hearts by Lou Reed, and Brick House by The Commodores
© C. Davidson