A Week in The Red House

One week. Seven days. One hundred and seventy hours. Ten girls. One house. The Red House.

Daily Schedule: I wake at or around 7 in the morning. Kaylyn is my Red House Roommate, now nicknamed by me "Scarlet" and "Chiara," depending on mood and personality-aspect. We usually come to at the same moment, exchange a few lazy comments on the sunshine pouring through our east-bound windows, and roll out of bed to go for our morning trip to the water. This is our room...

We have a bathroom en suite, and the railings in the first picture are actually the top of a small privy stair that leads to the kitchen (complete with cupboard-door and iron latch at the bottom). Kaylyn and I usually roll out of bed, pull on sweatshirts over our pyjamas, and either walk (barefoot) across the street to bid the ocean good morning, or else drive ten minutes to the skyswept beach on Assateague and perform our orisons to the sun as it rises from the sea. Here is a view over Assateague Beach, and another from it:

Yesterday I stripped off my socks in spite of the cold, and played tag with the waves.

These outings are invariably cold, but with an early, light-filled purity, which we find invigorating. Since Kaylyn had never met Atlantic before this trip, I took it upon myself to perform the introduction.

"Only one thing, Kaylyn," I said solemnly. "You must have a certain fear of the sea. Otherwise, it can kill you." This was wisdom that I had learned from my seafaring grandfather as a small girl. Kaylyn nodded. "Not a tame lion, then? But is she good?"

"No," I replied, decidedly. "She is not good. She is not even friendly. But, she is beautiful."

So we went. After a half hour on the dawn beach at Assateague, Kaylyn said, driving back, "I love the sound."
"Yes."
"What kind of poetry would the sea be?"
"All kinds," I said at once, for it is something I have thought of before. "She is free verse and metrical verse. She is unity in variety, more than anything else I know of on earth. And she is utterly indifferent. She is what the gods of old were---she neither needs nor wants us."


When we return, I brew hot cocoa and Kaylyn makes tea. We assemble our breakfasts on a tray and take it up to our room by the privy stair. All the rest of the house is still sleeping. The breakfast tray is set between us on the bed, and we have our quiet times, occasionally reading a snatch aloud or sharing a thought about God. I have been reading about God's holiness, and Kaylyn is studying Psalm 29 and Romans 5.


We wash up (both ourselves and the dishes), then settle in for a morning of reading and writing. I spread my things across the bed, but Kaylyn uses one of the wicker chairs and the sitting-room area attached to our room. Sometimes we are quiet; sometimes we play music; sometimes we read aloud and toss a question or an idea across the intervening space.


Lunch is a quiet, get-your-own affair, and the afternoon proceeds much as the morning did. There is absolutely nothing to do on Chincoteague---one is not distracted by so much as a movie theater. We see no one. Few cars pass. It is a place bound in the quiet of early spring. Though not nearly so pretty as the villages of Cape Cod (as I wrote in my last), it is a place that has the dignity of hard work about it. I read the Delmarva magazines strewn about The Red House, and from them I feel that I have come to know these people. Locally-written short stories and poems illuminate them---the sea is in their blood and brain and fingers, together with a homespun realism and love of simple pleasures. Their words are like their grocery store, having few sophisticated luxuries (we could not find any Dove chocolate or Italian cocoa) but plenty of efficient, hearty food, good in itself and good for the body.


My reading and writing consists of Beowulf and Dante's Commedia. I have fallen in love with the Italian poet's vision---he wants to encourage Christians with a description of the soul's progression to Paradise. In my eyes he has joined Bunyan as a great Christian artist who "puts heart" into one. That is what "encourage" means: "To put heart into." His final canto, describing the vision of God, brought me indeed into full delight, awe, joy, and worship.


The girls take turns preparing our evening meal, and we gather between six and seven-thirty. Sometimes conversation is exceedingly silly, and I am glad we have made a rule that what is said in this house stays in this house. Other times our talk revolves around God, the Christian life, the Gospel, and hard questions (such as Soul-force's impending visit).

The early evening is usually taken up with a movie; some of us return to our work in the later evening, whereas others choose to sleep.


That is the sum of our time here, now almost at an end. I write from the living room, surrounded by three other girls whose computers also sit on their laps. We are in sweats, jeans, t-shirts... no one is presentable in the dress-code sense of the word. No one cares. There is nothing to do and no one to see us. We are lost to our lives, and though we will return to them tomorrow, this space and time of contemplation has been a graciousness that I think we all feel.

Lisa entered a description of us into the guestbook: Ten girls who have come to study, to write stories, and to keep house.

Five of us got up at 6 this morning to watch the sun rise at Assateague Beach. We are in the morning of life, and as we stood there on the beach singing hymns to God, I thought that surely there is nothing that so pictures joy as the long molten pathway to the sun, flung by its rays to us across sea, space, time, and eternity. How can joy, ancient as it is, be eternally young?