Hush
When you walk in, you can feel that it’s a room for quiet voices or none at all. Even while adjacent to the front door, an origin of so much hustle and bustle, the two small hardwood steps down into this space give it an air of seclusion, removing it somehow from the rest of the house. The room is dressed in a palette of warm, comfort colors: cinnamon browns and sable black, mahogany reds and coffee crèmes. It’s the color of a crackling fireplace on a cold winter evening, of warming your toes over the heat register, of hot cocoa and freshly baked brownies and fuzzy socks.
Dust drifts lazily in the window light, giving the room a false impression of age and perhaps lack of use by the homeowners, contradicted by where she sits reclined on her corner of the couch, feet stretched out with one ankle resting on the other. This is how she will so often be found –- cat curled asleep on her lap, book in one hand, fingers of the opposite hand burrowing in soft ginger fur –- that she is almost a part of the room itself. Blink and you may miss her. There is no sound but the turning of the next page and the steady, staccato tick of the clock overhead. Tick tock, tick tock. Its reliable rhythm has long been such a staple in the room that she no longer hears it, though its absence would be jarring otherwise. The cat on her lap yawns, stretches languidly, then curls up the other way and returns to his dozing. He has effortlessly perfected the art of a lazy Sunday afternoon.
Along the wall stand the pair of wood bookcases. They are simple things, humble in design, yet they tower like redwoods. Queues of stories, legends, and memoirs line the shelves like soldiers, arranged in an deceptively haphazard way -– a thick hardcover volume here, a slimmer paperback there; seemingly random but meticulously styled in a way pleasing to the eye, or to hers at least. They are her dreams and diversions, and the room her sanctum; a moment of quiet recess when the world outside gets too loud.
