Workroom Corner

January is the month of inner comfort. I listen closely to the quiet inside my house, inside me, as outside, the cold descends and winds gust and sometimes snow falls. Silence prevails as my house holds its breath between the furnace fan’s periodic whooshing. I hear nothing but the white noise in my deaf ear, which is akin to the sound you hear holding a conch shell to your ear.

Seeking inner comfort, I drift around my house and notice the places and things that please me: the snug Wyeth room with its warm stove, the view from the upstairs bathroom window in very early morning, the quirky Victorian chair by the fireplace, and this particular corner of my workroom that exhibits the controlled chaos I find reassuring. There is order to be sure but taken with a decided grain of salt.

It’s clear to me that certain things prefer the company of each other. Old books love to linger collectively with other old books. Textures of chipped paint, twigs, string, metal and muslin are family. Colors muted into charcoal, sepia, rust, damask, ledger green and violet recite poems in perfect rhyme. January light filters through two layers of curtains: one lace, one organdy, and the corner seems to breathe a contented happiness.

Contentment is something quite delicious and rare in our madcap, consumer culture. It implies enoughness, an awareness and appreciation of completeness in this moment, the opposite of restlessness, hunger, frustration, emptiness, expectancy. Contentment comes to me on a walk at dusk when January trees are black against a gray sky. Or sitting at a friend’s table in a warm kitchen, thoughtful words flowing back and forth between us. Or lying in bed on a Sunday morning watching pale winter light seep through the faded curtain.

When I was young, I used to be suspicious of contentment, believing it was more the province of cows and well-fed cats than intelligent, curious human beings. But I had mistaken it for lethargy and dullness, when it is, in fact, a feeling that wakes me up to the world with its beauty and wonder, its diverse enchantments.

It is contentment and its inner comfort that I feel these long winter days when my town’s population is cut in half, and I can walk down the middle of Main Street in twilight and breathe in the cold air that feels like breathing stars. It’s a happiness beyond happy. A gratitude beyond thank you. Richer than riches, this January contentment, deeper than silence. Peace beyond measure.