A View From the Potting Shed
My general stress level makes me wonder how I manage to be mistaken for a normal, functioning human being from day-to-day. Wait, I do generally look normal and functioning, don’t I?
Floating down the river last Saturday was a wonderful moment of escape from an ordinary life, but I can’t get out and do that every day. So my mini-escape hatch is my potting shed. I can go out there and work on my iPad or read. I can ditch that feeling of the world simultaneously asking too much of me and not seeing that I’m there.
When I was house hunting two years ago, I found a home that was on the Elk River and was thickly surrounded by trees. I loved the lot the house was on, and it had a porch that looked out through the trees towards the river. On one viewing, I sat in the porch at a high top table, imagining myself sitting there in the morning, listening to the birds and rustle of wind, a mug of steaming coffee in front of me, while I wrote one of many best sellers.
Alas, that is not the house I ended up with, but my newly installed potting shed, with the view of chickens, is the next best thing. Right?
I think every woman needs a special place to get away from the sight of laundry, dirty dishes, and balls of dog and cat hair intermixed with sand that skitter across the floor as you walk through the room.
It’s also good to remove myself from sources of food that I eat mindlessly, trying to counteract the boredom of above said tasks or the frustration of being stuck on a paragraph that will not be beaten into something brilliant or at least funny.
Bit by bit, I am turning the potting shed into a cabin retreat — a space where my mind has room to run free.
Do you have such a place to escape? Or maybe not a place but an activity that heals the frazzles?
Boy! You have created a great new world for yourself. That potting shed is just what you needed. I’d like to see more pictures of the chicken coop with them in it. How are they doing?
Lori – Chickens are doing fine, but they’ll be even happier when we get an additional run added. I haven’t taken too many shots from outside the coop because the chickens don’t show well through the mesh. But I hope to have a photo update on overall garden and chicken progress next week.
Oh, I wish for a shed or a porch … or some chickens. We do have the creek right by our cottage so the sound of that is nice. Were you sorry that you didn’t get the house with on the river?
What a lovely get-away shed!
I love this post! It’s great to have a little place of escape from ” said ” hairballs, dust bunnies and piles of laundry “… Ours is a tiny beach cottage, but I also find my flower garden’s a mindful respite from what goes on inside my house! And I don’t have to pack for that little escape… Congrats on carving out a place your YOU! Love the view too!
When I was one of the last lucky ones to get to retreat at Norcroft a few years back, they had wonderful, small sheds, very much like yours, just for writing. I have always wanted to recreate the experience ever since. ‘Till then, Caribou will have to do.
By the way…the chickens are looking so good.
I love that you have your potting shed, Maery! Just what the doctor ordered. I can imagine how it helps for writing and getting away from it all.
In my last home (Atlanta), I had a special “sitting room” off the master bedroom which I called my Holy of Holies. It was where I went to meditate and put myself back together again. Taking a walk around our citadel city here in the Netherlands is the closest thing I havre to that now….but it’s not the same.
What a wonderful spot to escape to and find yourself.
I have a studio but it’s in the middle of the house and not really “escaped” from much. Everyone finds me there!
Lynn – It’s good to have a change of scenery, whatever it is.
Ginnie – I hope you’ll find a new place to sit and as you say, “put myself back together again”. That is a very good description of the kind of need the potting shed fulfills.
Marie – Having had an office escape in my previous home, I know how easy it is for people to find you. It’s funny with living alone, that I still have to remove myself from my house to feel like I can get some peace. The house itself is very demanding of my attention.
Susan – It was a disappointment not to be able to live in the other house but I backed out when there looked like there might be problems with a wood foundation it was built on.