What room in your home do you spend the most time in?

The big room that opens out onto my weathered gray deck. From this room I can see the pointy tip of Sharptop Mountain, though it's more obscured by treetops than in the past. From this room I can watch finches and cardinals eat seed and at night I can see the traveling phosphorescent dots of varmint eyes as they come around for compost. There are stacks and huddles of books in this room and sometimes they feel overwhelming but I love having them around. From here I can see Barry Lopez's beautiful book Home Ground, Jhumpa Lahiri's novel The Namesake, the Best American Short Stories of 2008, Rosamund Purcell's Book Worm, the 2008 Photographer's Market, a couple of old issues of Parabola Magazine, an old blank book I filled with other people's words in 1995, Rosalind Solomon's strange and hefty book of photography Chapalingas, and an old Spanish textbook, Poco a Poco. And so many others.The hearth is one of the most sacred spots in the house though it often gets cluttered with resin and incense dust and bits of wax from old candle stubs that I've used to get fires going. There's a little clay saucer with a charcoal disk and some copal resin on it now and there's an old metal owl luminary off to the side that Ron gave me. I like to light  it up on Hallowe'en. I love its wonky scowl and the silliness of it. This room is really a dining room too. The table is big and heavy and round and made of dark blond wood. The captain's chairs around it are shaky and in need of repair, some of them. This is the table of my childhood snacks and suppers and it's older than I am. It's home right now to a couple of stalks of bright green bamboo rising up from plain glass jars and  to a huddle of Granny Smiths in a locally made bowl the color of Georgia clay. Wherever I am there are pens and post-it notes and old postcards of Scottish standing stones and blue herons and Edward Weston's shells, and I like having these things here on the table along with candles and matches and sunglasses and such. Over by the doorway leading into one of the bedrooms there are a couple of old canvas tote bags full of photographs and sketches and images cut from magazines for me to use in the collage art I keep saying I'm going to do. Right now I'm honestly too busy so I just go over to the pictures from time to time and look at them. They remind me of what I see and what I want to show people.
This is a busy room, full of old shells and patchouli sachet tucked into rectangles of gingham and jigsaw puzzles and old issues of the New Yorker. It's a silly room, with water pistols tucked away under an old table off to the side and a little book of sea turtle stickers hanging out next to a children's book about the sacred places of the Cherokee. This is a room of whimsy and clutter, of sincerity and things half started, of remembrance and the suspended sometimes revisited momentum of works in progress. Overflowing and generative, a bit short on simplicity at times, but very much alive.