I’ve been painting. This, of course, is obvious to anyone who stands near me. I have paint in my hair still, paint in my rings and paint that continues to mysteriously reappear on my forearms and shoes even after I think I’ve cleaned it all off.
Every several years or so, I develop a focused, near-obsessive, hankering for re-do. Frequently it involves paint.
Last weekend I painted all day – three gallons of dark ivory to cover the blast-off blue of what we used to call the rocket room: the space the boys shared before they moved downstairs to boytown. Boy-town is an apt and borrowed name for basement bedrooms housing boys.
It was Sunday night, but I wasn’t quite done with the room. My sons were kicking soccer balls at each other in boy-town and my husband had to go out. Before he left, he looked at me, all paint-dropped and droopy, and said “Don’t move furniture. We’ll finish it tomorrow. Sit down. Stop.”
Mess was still everywhere. The paint-can lid needed to be hammered down, the drop cloth was bunched and fisted into a sticky pile, the spider-webby, outdoor ladder I had dragged down the hallway still leaned against the bookshelf, and the bed was heaped with weeks of dump-it-here junk. Several paintbrushes were wrapped in foil from the day before. One – the freshest – was propped, soaking, in the cup in the bathroom.
What I should have been thinking, while surveying this post-paint chaos was “…and hours to go before I sleep.” Instead I was thinking “I need to finish just one thing …”
I dragged the too-heavy pine tabletop out of the back of the closet where it had lived since I’d stopped using it as my desk months ago. I reattached the legs with a ratchet wrench, and hefted it upright into the corner of the room. I wiped it down. I centered it, aligned it, and wriggled it out from the wall a bit. “There. Done.”
I said this just as the wrench case slid off the bed and cylindrical silver doohickeys bounced everywhere. It didn’t give me pause. I kept looking at the wide expanse of empty table and continued to think “Ahh. Finally. Done.”
Every life needs an empty tabletop.
An empty tabletop can stand for a place to be imperfect – and, dear God, we all need a little space for that. It can be a place to putter and stash. A place to project, and sort and organize. A place to mismatch and rehash and wrap up. It can be a place to fan out and lay ideas down.
In our tightly constricted, highly scheduled lives, sometimes we forget to simply open a blank spot. We forget to clear a space so that something new, something unplanned and unknown, can move quietly and unforced into that space.
We need purposeful and mindful clearing of space. We need blank spots in our lives. You never know what you may end up building in a blank spot, or what may build itself there while you aren’t looking.
If you have no room for a table, no matter. If you have no money for a table, no matter. If you have no time for a table, no matter. You can clear one in your head – some people do it with meditation, some with exercise, some with cooking, or cleaning, or music or praying. It matters not. There are so very many ways to listen and to pay attention, after all. But, each one of them starts with clearing a spot, in your head, or in your day, or in your house.
Clear your table, even if just for a moment. Glean space. Watch for a while, pay attention for a bit. And then walk away and leave it. You can come back. The something that will eventually move into your newfound space may be just exactly what you needed.
E-mail Fort Collins poet and writer Natalie Costanza-Chavez at grace-notes@comcast.net. Read more of her essays at .
