Writing Space

Ode to the Laptop

Some writers I know like to write in public spaces.

The din of conversation, the aroma of roasted coffee beans and baked three-berry muffins, the hiss of the capacino machine, the pragmatic ding of the cash register. . . because, you know....money has a way of inserting itself... everywhere.

But when the croissants and the eavesdropping prove too tempting to resist (those delicious snippets of people's lives! Those calorie-laden feathery layers of pastry!), when the incessant --and insistant--ding ding ding of capitalism punctures your aesthetic haze, isn't it nice to boot up in your own kitchen?

Case in point: My Kitchen Table Writing Space.

Cherished Apple laptop, a pile of New York Times and Greenville News, Buddha, my late grandmother's vintage tablecloth, collected cobalt blue bottles from flea market, lucky bamboo and propagated cardinal flower, the last of the summer flowers--zinnia, veronica, black-eyed Susan--cup o'coffee (shade grown, organic...in a souvenier cup from the Eudora Welty Mississippi Writing Conference), stuff I'm researching (Interlibrary loan books about the 1929 communist-strike in Gastonia), Ragtime, a novel by E.L Doctorow that I just read that is *&!#%! genius (but everybody already knows that), a hawk's feather, fortune cookies, a hanging handmade cool thing my neighbor Raina gave me. Sound effects: bird songs from bird feeder outside of window.

A room with a view, anyway.