"The house has been empty, shuttered, braced against intrusion. You have the key. Inside all is dim, hushed. You take a few steps forward, drop the bags, and breathe in the slumber of your rooms. The dust has settled, but somehow the air is dense with stillness. Absence has a presence. You feel it and smell it and hear it; you sense it, the way an animal senses, fleetingly, in those few moments through the door.
The rooms ... they're not as you remember them. Absence warps, distorts. ,Everything seems slightly aslant somehow. Bigger. Smaller.
Perhaps you're unable to stand the silence. Or perhaps you can no longer resist the embrace of rooms poised to take you in. You're moved to break the spell. You breathe the heavy silence one last moment and you reach for a switch. Turn on the lights. ..."
Found Dominque Browning's words this weekend while flipping through a pile of saved magazines. What timing. What truths Dominique writes. The cover's header: Home Again.
SOURCE: House & Garden, Sept 1996, p. 29
"Welcome - Turn on the Lights" by Dominique Browning
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
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1 comments:
I’m so pleased to hear that Dominique’s words spoke to you. You might be interested to know that her new memoir SLOW LOVE: HOW I LOST MY JOB, PUT ON MY PAJAMAS & FOUND HAPPINESS will be published later this spring. Publisher’s weekly raved today: “There is such feeling and care on each page of Browning’s well-honed memoir—her rediscovery of nature, her avowal to let love find her rather than seek it, tapping satisfying work at her own keyboard—that the reader is swept along in a pleasant mood of transcendence.”
http://www.amazon.com/Slow-Love-Knocked-Pajamas-Happiness/dp/1934633313
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