A Room of One's Own

I have been daydreaming a lot lately.

I used to dream almost constantly, but that stopped while I was pursuing my Master’s degree. Almost overnight, it felt like I morphed from a passionate do-gooder with a colossal lust for life to a vacant zombie who was just slogging through and trying to get the program done; getting it done well was pretty much an afterthought.

Anyway, it feels like it’s taken a long time, but slowly and surely I’ve started to reclaim my former self and to let my imagination run loose! I’ve heard it said that you can only be limited by the boundaries of your own imagination, so I’ve taken the liberty of knocking down any fences of self-censorship and letting my dreams wander wherever they please. Lately, they’ve been hovering around one particular manifestation of Marty’s and my dream home.

I’ve often thought about my ideal home, but from the time in Grade 7 French class when we were supposed to construct a cardboard rendition of our dream home and all I did was write a shoddy narrative about it en français until recently, I’ve had a difficult time visualizing what I could so easily describe. Then we moved to Victoria and one version of our dream home was there, just a few blocks away from our apartment!

This home is perched atop not one, not two, but three quaint little shops in the village section of our lovely neighbourhood. I never would have even noticed it, had we not walked by it one evening and seen the lofty living quarters illuminated and shining warmth and coziness down onto the street.

Inside the main section is a vaulted ceiling and rich orange walls. There are plants, a bedroom loft, and a peaceful solarium just adjacent to the living room. Everything about this home strikes a jubilant chord within me: I love that there would be no neighbours above us to keep us awake with booming video games and painfully incompetent band practices (only to then wake us up early with the never-ending alarm clock beeps from hell). I love that the businesses below us would all be closed long before bedtime each night. I love that Marty would be able to set up a studio space in the solarium and to paint in natural light. I love the size of the home—not too big, but not too small, either. I love the inviting aura that the current occupants have established (now if I could only go inside!) Finally, I love the idea of one day setting up a gallery in the same building as our home. It has always been a dream to open up our own gallery/creative space, but I’ve never been able to actually see what it might look like until now.

Of course, this home is but one rendition of our ideal living space. We also have grand visions of mountain log cabins, cozy cottages in the Okanagan, and sprawling acreages in the rolling hills of the Czech Republic. Granted, we are so far away financially from reaching even one of these ideals right now, but as always, it never hurts to dream.