Favorite things

Too often I spend time looking at the dog hair accumulated on the couch or the dishes I haven’t done and I forget to enjoy the little corners of the house that I’ve created that make me happy.  So once in a while, I’m going to document some of those little nooks and crannies that have turned out just the way I planned.

First one is the typewriter.  This green beast was actually my grandmother’s, someone who I adore to this day and miss terribly.  My mom rescued it from her house before the auction, and I’m so glad she did.  It means a lot to me not just because of the association with Grandma but also because I have fond memories of banging away on typewriters when I was little, both at my own house and at the house of a family friend who encouraged me to write.  Words have always been the most important thing to me, whether written by me or someone else, and the sound of a typewriter clacking away is the sound I think of when I think of creativity.

When I put the typewriter out, it most obviously needed to be at work.  So I typed my favorite quote on a sheet of paper. 

There comes a special moment in everyone's life, a moment for which that person was born.  That special opportunity, when he seizes it, will fulfill his mission--a mission for which he is uniquely qualified.  In that moment, he finds greatness.  It is his finest hour.

--Winston Churchill

I’m fairly sure it was the first decorative thing I put out in our house, and I feel like that’s important.  I’ve left the same sheet in there and have never dusted it (that’s not the only thing in this house that probably hasn’t been dusted, now that I think about it...), and it’s starting to get yellowy and dirty around the edges and I love it.  I can almost pretend that it’s the ACTUAL SHEET that Churchill ACTUALLY TYPED--well, okay, he dictated it to his secretary, who was named Elizabeth, because all good English secretaries in WWII were named Elizabeth and also because Google told me that was her name--and it was in the secret war tunnels when the Blitz was on and he was smoking a cigar and you could hear the bombs landing and he was writing the big important speech that was going to WIN THE WAR. 

But I digress.