Every Creative Needs a Room of Their Own

With curation, my sewing room offers much more than workspace.

Photo by author.

“I found Peaches!”

I look up from sorting papers at my stepdad George’s kitchen table. He died a few days earlier, at home, at age ninety. Now seven of us are sorting, dividing, and donating his belongings. Jean is working on the shelf under the sideboard. I expect she’s found a cache of home-canned peaches in glass Ball jars. The peach harvest here in the mountains is always a big deal.

Wrong.

She points to a box of a certain size. Turns out she’s found the cremated ashes of George’s insanely speedy Miniature Pinscher, Peaches — with a capital “P.” We decide we’ll take them with us to Ohio with George’s ashes and bury them together beside his first wife, Jean’s sister Janet. We figure it’s what George would want. Why else would he label the cremains and leave them?

Since my mother’s death five years ago, I’ve continued to enjoy being at the house where she and George lived for over two decades. George didn’t rearrange it after Mom died, only adding what he needed or replacing what might have broken. The same refrigerator magnet of a fat baby in a devil’s costume is stuck on the frig. The curtains Mom sewed hang in the bathroom. Time in the home underlines the continuity…