Biography & Autobiography
It's been variously said -- and famously so by Virginia Woolf -- that every woman writer needs a room of her own.
I had a room.
It was not enough.
* * *
In our inner-city neighbourhood there's at least one artist, student, professional, senior, and addict on every block. As a writer of literary books -- and other things that actually pay, including articles for the Western Producer and short humorous pieces for CBC Radio Saskatchewan -- I fit in. But the city also turns me inside out: the noise, the crime, the busyness. When Frank and Margaret -- the elderly Mennonite couple who lived next to us for a decade -- moved on, the house was purchased as a revenue property and the troubles began.
Always, it's been young men. Drinking. Drugs. Dangerous driving. Coming and going through the devil's hours of the night. I haven't slept properly in my own home for years. Aside from the pair who really trashed the basement suite -- and blared gangster rap day and night, left hypodermics in my flowerbed, and skipped from province to province fleeing arrest warrants -- I likely don't have any reason to fear the convoy of punks who park in our spot, deliberately cross our front lawn, shatter beer bottles, and whoop, yell, and knock on our windows via the shared sidewalk between our houses (where they occasionally relieve themselves). They haven't threatened me or anyone in my family, but I sense the potential for violence (there was the beer-swigging trio who chucked machetes around the yard after they hacked down Frank and Margaret's beloved crabapple tree).
I fear for my teenagers, who often traverse the corridor at night, my husband, who recently confronted a half dozen of the neighbouring miscreants, and I fear for my own body, mind, and spirit.
Something terrible is imminent.
* * *
I am a 39-year-old woman, in love with my husband and having fun with my teenagers, and I have spontaneously just bought myself a house away from them all. Today, the day after I signed the deposit cheque and lined up a lawyer, I am four hours west and north of the city that's been making me crazy, raw nerve by raw nerve.
* * *
I could weep for all that's ahead of me. Solitude, and my own furniture. My own yard. The requisite planting around the house; the flowerbeds appear to have been neglected for years. A wood stove. Rooms that require scrap rugs. And paint.
