Nichole Bernier
My writing space is a work in progress. For years I’ve written in libraries and coffeeshops, a rotation of favorites in the places we’ve lived. But sometime next year I’ll leave my regular seat in the library and move into a sunny second-floor room in our house. As much as I’ve dreamed of it—steps up from the stairway behind French doors, like a sunporch, or a turret—it’s bittersweet, too. Because this move will happen when I concede that our last baby is old enough to leave what’s been his nursery and join the big kids, sharing their rooms and their more complex bedtime stories.
My office-to-be is in the heart of the house, for better or for worse, accessible to its energy and need. But the light makes it irresistible. Two walls of windows look across the yard, over pine trees and Japanese maple, forsythia bushes and the hermit-crab graves.
We’ll roll out the crib, but what comes next is just a collection of ideas. An old desk, probably something from the Brimfield antiques fair. A tattered armchair I’ve had since graduate school; its cushions still have stray hairs from my cat, gone five years. My grandfather’s Underwood typewriter, rescued with him in a lifeboat when his WWII ship was torpedoed by a U-boat off the coast of Rhode Island. (Yes, this happened in our waters.) Decades later, he willed it to me instead of the Smithsonian, because it looked like I was becoming a writer.
On top of my imagined desk, I’ll store pens and notecards in a miniature trunk given to me by my dearest writing friends. It was a gift celebrating the sale of my novel, which involves an antique trunk. Inside I’ve taped the slip of paper from a fortune cookie 11 years ago, received like a blessing as I was nervously considering parenthood: “It’s worth the risk.” It’s as true for the prospect of beginning a novel.
Nichole Bernier is a freelance writer and the author of the novel The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. (Crown, 2012). She lives west of Boston with her husband and five children. You can find her online at www.nicholebernier.com and on Twitter @nicholebernier.
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