A Place of My Own
August 20th, 2009 by Mollie
I bought this book about 10 days before I found out I was pregnant. There has always been this deep need that regularly manifests itself to me, through daydream, to have a simple place of my/our own to retreat to. A place of solitude. Of simplicity. And of nature. At the time we were looking for land to buy that could meet my desire for separation from the world and Kendall’s desire for running water. I would go to the library and read through every issue regarding green, prefab buildings hoping that within a year or two we would be able to plop one down and call it our place of rest. So, it is no surprise that after reading Michael Pollan’s In Defense of Food and loving it, that I put A Place of My Own on my wishlist and bought it for my birthday.
However, a couple of things transpired at once resulting in my daydreams of a place near a river, in the woods, with running water having to be put on hold. The biggest event being news of the pending baby. This also meant that the second bedroom that had been Kendall’s office for so long, which, he had recently vacated after getting the opportunity to rent a space with a great community of guys, and which, I had begun to transition into a studio that would function as a room of my own where I would create, write, and relax would now be needed for baby. This room of mine, which I had been so excited about, was such a big deal that it was often the one of the first things that people remarked about when finding out I was pregnant. Yet, the realization that I was going to have a baby only served to reinforce the fact that having a space of my own was important and from the beginning I decided that me and Baby would share that room.
With the swift reality of my “place” being significantly downgraded to “space” (still a luxury I know), compounded with my morning sickness making reading anything but out of the question, it is only now that I have picked up and read A Place of My Own (and that only at Kendall’s strong encouragement). It is curious then, given my new circumstances, that I quickly came to feel, even while still in the midst of the preface, that this book may be more timely for me now than it was when I bought it.
It’s a book about significant turnings in the season’s of one’s life. It is about the need for that which is concrete and tangible. Pollan needed a physical structure in which he could work out his internal stirrings. He needed a place to daydream. For, “[w]ithout its daydreams, the self is apt to shrink down to the size and shape of the estimation of others.” As someone with a very active internal world, this connection between the intangiblity of thoughts and the reality of the physical made sense to me. I need a physical space that provides me with the freedom to mentally explore and one that also has the ability to reconnect myself and my thoughts to the physical world when I come back down.