I don’t really know why or when I stopped doing art. The flow of drawings that had poured out of me in my early teenage years had dried up by early twelfth grade. An abortive visit to an art school coinciding with a big scholarship offer to the state school, not to mention the normal busyness of senior year and an overloaded academic schedule, probably all coalesced into a sort of fog that hung around me for the next several years.

In fact, it wasn’t until I had something of a personal crisis that I even considered resuming art in anything like a serious way. Don’t get me wrong, I’d still doodled and sketched, even made the occasional painting. But something about the cataclysm I was navigating made me go, “You know, maybe I should get back to drawing.” I don’t remember when or why I had that thought, either, but by about this time last year I was starting to realize that the loss of my regular artistic output had coincided with a season of flatness and gray, a sort of stagnation and boredom that I had been unable to shake.

Fast-forward a year. I’m living in a new town, a new state, heck, a radically different sort of place than I have ever lived before. My observant friends have asked “So, are you doing okay?” with that up-talking lilt at the end that indicates that they’ve been trying to figure out how to ask. I am a creature of metropolitan habits, and so moving to a place that the other rural people in the area think is the middle of nowhere is, yes, a bit of a culture shock! A bit different from what I’m used to! It’s a lot! It’s a learning curve! All said in that strained tone that says, I mean, I think I’m doing okay, but I wouldn’t know how to tell you if I wasn’t, either.

So I find myself three months into our new home, still painting (forever painting), recoloring every single square inch of this big house with the slow intensity of the weird fuzzy caterpillars scooting around the front yard that my husband insists can predict the weather this winter. “No, mom,” I breathlessly explain, “I really can’t paint the living room a different color, because Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the German guy who wrote Faust and Der Erlkönig, says you should paint the rooms you spend a lot of time in green, and absolutely under no conditions should it be blue.” Maybe the man of indeterminate mood at the Sherwin-Williams store will understand, but I doubt that. I paint until the tips of my fingers go numb, my college nerve damage from writing too many notes reawakening and putting Jonathan on dishwashing duty for at least a week. The kitchen and dining room, torn apart and put back together, is now the color of honeybees. The upstairs ceilings are painted a calmer white, one that will eventually make its way to the ground floor and the trim. The upstairs guest room is blue, because I think Goethe would appreciate that the upstairs, located as it is up in the air, is the color of the sky. But the room for my art is still unpainted, still some uncanny “flesh” crayon color, that sickly peachish that has absolutely never been the color of a person’s cheeks and the creases around their eyes.

I bought the paint in July or early August, and, by God, I am going to paint my home studio. It’s the extra room on the first floor so I can check on my sourdough bread and get back to drawing, so I don’t spill paint on the new second floor carpet, so I can have a place for my books and my brushes and my knitting stuff and my keyboard, my weird millennial low-tech typewriter and all the stupid gadgets I need to make YouTube videos. Roycroft Bronze Green: green because Goethe says your study should be green, and this room is doing double—really triple—duty: studio, study, and home office for my “real job.” Dark green because my art teacher said if it was too light, I’d have a harder time controlling the shadows on a still life setup. Dark green with a pretentious Victorian name because art history and my boss have convinced me that the Arts and Crafts movement was the last really good popular architectural movement, and because I am a pretentious Victorian paint kind of person, apparently.

It’s nine o’clock in the evening and I am finishing up the first coat, filling in a gap on the fourth wall by the second (?) closet. “Blue Red and Gray” by the Who is playing:

I dig every second
I can laugh in the snow and rain
I get a buzz from being cold and wet
The pleasure seems to balance out the pain

And so you see that I’m completely crazy
I even shun the south of France
The people on the hill, they say I’m lazy
But when they sleep, I sing and dance

Some people have to have the sultry evenings
Cocktails in the blue, red and grey
But I like every minute of the day
I like every minute of the day

I’m crying finishing painting this wall. Why am I crying? It’s not a sad crying, or an overwhelmed crying—I have so much still to do, so so much before I can even think about thinking about calling myself done, “settled,” whatever. But it’s not that. It’s a happy cry. It’s a, “Oh my goodness, finally, finally I have a little spot again” cry. A little spot for drawing and looking out the window at the goats and the neighbor’s goofy dogs and the warm orangey October leaves on the trees. (“I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers,” I wholeheartedly say with Anne Shirley.)

I’m crying because drawing if a gift, making things is a gift, and even if so much else right now is confusing and new to me, I can go back to friends pencil and paintbrush and paper and do something that makes the world make sense again, even if it’s just for ten or twenty minutes. I’m crying because this green is so pretty and it’s so nice to live in a world where things are pretty and there are so many colors and some of them even have pretentious Victorian names. There is a little corner of this world again, like my drafting table in my childhood bedroom, a spot given as gift and entrusted to me as a steward, a steward of my time and resources and talents, where I don’t feel lame or weird or incomprehensible. There is a little corner for me to make things and make sense of the world and of me. And it’s Roycroft Bronze Green, a color that makes me think of deep shady leaves and that arsenic wallpaper that killed people in the 1800s but mainly calm things and contented things. The room and the things in it and the color on the wall (even the ugly color that finally broke me out of my stupor and into action) and the time I spend in there is all a gift.

I have to do the second coat tomorrow. And then I need to put all the switchplates and things back in the walls. And then I need to move my furniture back. And then I need to unpack my books and my art supplies and my knitting things and my keyboard stuff. And then I need to buy a keyboard stand. And then I need to find a cheap wingback for the corner. And then I need to put up my art prints and my inspiration boards. And paint the ceiling. And the trim. And the bedroom and living room and hallway and upstairs and sometimes it feels like all three and a half acres we live on will eventually be painted some kind of aspirational William Morris-looking color. There are days when it’s not fun, when it’s hard and I am not, in fact, doing okay. But it’ll be okay. I have my art and my little green room and it’s all a gift to me.