THE GLORIOUS FUN OF PLANNING

When I came out of the library this afternoon (it was a good afternoon for library-going) I was accosted by a gust of cold that made me complain out loud.  It is the first chilly day, and likely just a pocket in the mildness of fall, but also the advance guard of a coming winter.

The cold hit me too hard last year - too many gloomy days when my fingers didn't want to move and there was not enough warmth in this drafty old house, days when I was about as useful as a bump on a log (more literally, a bump on a couch).  Those were days I am not eager to repeat.  I am spending this blustery day making plans for the room that will be the answer to the winter slump.

The room in question has been deservingly called tiny, but in my mind's eye it is lavishly furnished in splendor that transcends its size.  I have been combing through my stash of magazines for ideas.  I envision something like Gilmore Girls if it was written by Terry Pratchett and directed by Wes Anderson (as if a room could ever live up to all that!) I love this stage of the creative process, when all possibilities are equally as real and every imagining is jostling in line for consideration.  

I've been calling it "the studio," which may sound pretentious but is leagues more exciting than a plain old office.  A studio implies a space for creation, and I intend to create in it: long Jane Austen-worthy correspondences, garlands of paper flowers, and possibly (when I am feeling especially pretentious, I add this) a book.

You may begin to understand just how important this room will be.

So I'm lost in merry planning, even as the so-called studio is in the throes of a laborious paint job.  I'm uncharacteristically looking forward to those coming weeks of consistent, persistent cold.  By then, I hope, I will be snug in a room dressed in pure inspiration.

And in such a room anything can happen.