Home, and the heart

I wrote recently about how my thoughts have changed on the dream that I had held to for most of my life until recently; a shorts-and-teeshirt-and — ultimately — adolescent vision of what I'd always seen as a distant future.

I saw a beach, somewhere, and sand, and sea, and the expanse of a holiday ocean, and all of those things that go hand-in-hand with that picture. Heat, and the autumn of life, but without the thought of falling leaves.

With a broad brush, I painted the outlines of what that dream now looks like, in grays and greens and the slopes of windswept cliffs. But I didn't, then, touch on what I saw inside that moment, the place in which I might live, those rooms in which I might spend my waking days.

I can picture the main room that I'd likely live in.

It's a fairly small room, and the impression I have is that it's slightly rounded in shape. For the size of the room, there's a large open fire, in a high, arched mouth, and the walls are granite or a similar stone, bare, not dressed.

The windows are very few, and are thin, and arched, and high. The walls — in my admittedly-limited minds-eye view — are lined all round with shelves, and each shelf is entirely lined with books. The light there is in the room comes from the fire (obviously) and a couple of small, but tall, oil-styled electric lamps, seated on thin, wooden tables. There are keepsakes, rather than photographs, although there are photographs amongst them; but with moments the focus, rather than the people. An instant in time that resonates still, down the years and into my days, now.

The floor is uncarpeted, but thick with rugs over close-fitting slatted wood, all for keeping the fire's warmth in. The hearth is raised, but has nothing much on it that I can see - a poker for the fire, split wood to the side.

The picture, for me, is vivid.

The part of the world, this land of dream, is unknown, but it's in the grip of storms, often, and perhaps mostly. I feel that, if it's an island, it is close to the mainland somewhere; or on the distant edge of a peninsula, maybe. I don't get the sense that it's in the southern hemisphere and so I think, for now, that it's somewhere in, or off the coast of, Scotland somewhere, tho not the East coast where I lived as a child.

The coast is in sight from my window. The sense I have is of an old, compact, 2 or maybe 3-storey granite building, on the rise of a small hill, with short cliffs nearby. My minds eye sees rain at the windows, long streaks down slight glass - and I can feel that it's an often-times thing, this rain - and open seas beyond a smattering of trees. Wind, and often thunder, rolling in off the sea, the roil of whitecaps distantly seen tho not wild.

Lining this dream room are, like I've said, books. Shelves, and more shelves. Ten thousand and more lives lived, in ten thousand and more worlds, each of them the momentary shape, or the sound, or the colour, or the remembrance of some tiny corner of the heart, experienced and held. The true inhabitants of this room, if you like; the people who make the feeling of home for me, in a storm-wracked room on a windswept and rain-streaked night, in the hold of a memory yet to take true shape.

And so: Paradise, as a library. My true tribe, my true home. In a storm-wracked room, on a windswept and rain-streaked night.