The Crowded Room
It’s that time of year again. It’s time to wax slightly nostalgic
and do a little navel gazing and reflecting. The last week of the year has
always fascinated me. It’s not like the rest of the year. It’s almost like
there are really only fifty-one weeks in the year, then there’s the crowded
room of a space tacked on to the end, a place not unlike my grandmother’s
living room was, all crowded full of the bits and pieces and memorabilia of
eighty-three years of living.
The last week of the year is a mini version of that living
room that happens anew every year, a mental version, a room that everyone has
in their head. It doesn’t matter how expansive or how crazy the previous
fifty-one weeks have been, this final week is the tiny space into which we
crowd everything that has happened, and for those last seven days of the year,
we reflect and remember.
At the front of that crowded room is a big picture window
looking back onto all of the past years of experiences. During this last week
of 2011, we’ll go inside that room, shut the door behind us, knowing we’ll
never go back through that door again. There we’ll settle in to the one comfy
chair, the only space that isn’t avalanching with memories and emotions and experiences,
and we’ll reflect. Occasionally we’ll stop for a long stare out the window into
the years past to try and make out how it all fits together. I often write a massive
journal entry at the year’s end. I settle in with wine and chocolate and good
coffee and all my favourite things and write. The entry is always full of
reflections and memories and plans for the future, all done during the time
spent in that crowded room that’s the last week of the year. I wager I’m in
good company in that endeavor.
I used to ask my grandmother who was in this old photo or
that, or where she got this porcelain doll or that china figurine. Every item
in her living room had a story. It was a gift from someone, or a souvenir from
some marked event in her life, or something someone had made for her or she had
made for herself. My grandmother’s living room was a book full of stories I
only ever experienced through her eyes, stories that were lost in the mist to
anyone but her and the few of her older friends who still remained, all with
story book living rooms of their own.
This time of year, in this last week, we all sit in our
mental story book living rooms and tell ourselves one last time the stories
that have been our life for the past fifty-one weeks. We laugh at our joys, we
mourn our losses, thankful that they’re now passed and we nod our heads in
satisfaction at our successes, promising they’ll be even bigger next year.
My grandmother lived to be eighty-three. There was a
finality about her over-crowded living room. That last-week-of-the-year room we
all occupy right now has its own finality. After midnight tomorrow, we can
crowd no more into that room. We leave it as it is, papers strewn, boxes open,
bed unmade, cup of tea half finished. Mind you, some of us spend our last hours
in that room frantically trying to crowd just a little more into it. That’s me,
sitting in the recliner madly tapping away at the laptop trying to get another
chapter written, another short story out before I have to leave this room and
lock the door behind me.
And it’s been a good year, a wild rambunctious year crowded
with laughter and tears and the celebration of two new novels, a challenging
Coast to Coast walk across England, conferences, readings, vegetables planted
and eaten. I have lots of pictures in my year’s mental photo album, I have lots
of triumphs and losses, and lots of time spent with wonderful friends and loved
ones. Hold it! I’ll stop right now because once I get going, I’ll give you the
whole inventory, and you, no doubt have your own crowded room to inventory.
It doesn’t matter though, if we’re sitting reflecting on all
that fills this room, or if we’re frantically trying to fill it fuller before
the clock strikes. At midnight tomorrow night, we’ll all take a deep breath,
open the door and walk out into the empty room waiting for us, the empty room
that’s 2012. All we’ll take with us is our memories of the room we left and our
hopes and plans for how we’ll fill this bright new room that stretches
promisingly before us. Some of us make New Years resolutions, some of us just
plow in without a plan of action, but one thing is for certain, this time next
year, if we live that long, we’ll be sitting in the full room again reflecting
on how the experiences of 2012 have shaped us, anticipating how we’ll take the
experiences into the next empty room. And that’s all we’ll be allowed to take
with us, our experiences, our memories,
My wish for you all is that your reflections in your crowded
room will be good ones, satisfying ones. And at the stroke of midnight, that you’ll
enter that bright new empty room of 2012 with hope and joy and anticipation of
how wonderfully you’ll fill it up.
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Bio:
K D Grace lives in South England with her
husband and a back garden full of free-loading birds. When she’s not writing,
she practices extreme vegetable gardening. The plan is take over the world with
veg plots. It’s the veg plot plot.
She walks her stories, and she’s serious about it. This August she and her
husband walked the Coast to Coast rout across England. For her, inspiration is
directly proportionate to how quickly she wears out a pair of walking boots.
She believes Freud was right. In the end, it really IS all about sex, well
sex and love. And nobody’s happier about that than she, cuz otherwise, what
would she write about?
She has erotica published with Xcite Books, Mammoth, Cleis Press, Black
Lace, Erotic Review, Ravenous Romance, and Scarlet Magazine.
Her critically acclaimed erotic romance novels include, The Initiation of
Ms Holly, and The Pet Shop, both published by Xcite Books.
The first book of her Lakeland Heatwave trilogy, Body
Temperature and Rising, is now available in all eBook formats.
Available in paperback February 2012.
Website: kdgrace.co.uk
She’s also on Facebook and Twitter.
I'll be giving away a free pdf copy of either of my novels, The
Initiation of Ms Holly, or The Pet Shop.
Winner's choice. Jump over to my website kdgrace.co.uk and leave a comment along with your email for a chance to win.
What an interesting way to view the last week. I never looked at it that way but I agree with you.
ReplyDeletedebby236 at gmail dot com
K.D.,
ReplyDeleteThank you for such a moving post. It gave me a lot of reasons to sit down and think during the end of 2011.
Happy New Year to All.
Thanks,
Tracey D
booklover0226 at gmail dot com
Thanks Debby and Tracey,
ReplyDeleteWishing both of you fab memories of the crowded room of 2011 and a great new beginning to filling the empty room that is 2012.
All the best,
K D Grace