"Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time, the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics."

--Virginia Woolf

Dr. Christiane Northrup has said (or perhaps quoted a colleague as saying) that fibroid tumors, a common enough malady among women, are the result of their collected anger and frustration. She tells of patients who wanted to avoid surgery for fibroids coming to her for advice. She told them to go do what they had really wanted to but had been afraid or reluctant to do. If they wanted to paint or travel or study or extricate themselves from bad relationships, she gave them permission and a directive to do it. When these patients returned, she reports that many of their tumors had shrunk or disappeared. Women's bodies were vessels corroded by their own disappointment and sadness.

Kitchens have always seemed to me to be the hearts of homes. But those hearts often signal, in ways that may not be perceptible to many, that they are broken. The frustration and sorrow of the women who have spent hours in those kitchens pervades the air like a spicy aroma that won't dissipate. When I stand at the sink and wash dishes, I look out of a kitchen window that may not have been in this same spot when the house was built in 1829, but I feel a kinship, nonetheless, with Permelia and later Hazel and most recently Kay, some of the women who lived in this house before I did. I wonder about their disappointments because sometimes I can feel the old house sigh under the weight of them.

On the porch, I like to shell butterbeans or peel peaches and think of all the women before me who sat here and did these ordinary things. I wonder if they longed to travel elsewhere, or if they had ambitions beyond the road that curves in front of the old house. If they were dissatisfied, even that yearning is a gut-level connection to all the women before me.

I have ambitions, although my dreams have become smaller than when I was five and stood on my mother's bed, looking at myself in the dresser mirror with my arms stretched wide and saying, "I'm the smartest girl in the world!" Later at 10, I remember my brother looking up from the old car he was under, and saying he understood and felt the same way when I said it seemed like a waste of a life not to be famous, that being ordinary and forgotten after death was the worst thing I could think of.

Later I dreamed of being a famous singer or musician. Then I dreamed of just being romantically allied with one. When that shift came—when the desire to be the star changed to a desire just to be close to the star—I and the world lost something.

I don't dream of fame anymore. But I dream of being no one's fool, of creating the worlds I can imagine when I drive past houses and fields and bodies of water that feel so real and detailed that I would swear they're memories of a past life. If I were able to put these worlds on paper or on film or into song, would I be able to convey those details so clearly that they would come alive for others as well? Could I create models for us to follow in reality—models of communities that function on love rather than fear? Could I nudge the world toward a more compassionate reality through a fictitious world I create?

I knew I wanted an old house. I needed to feel that there was a history and presence in my home that new construction, beautiful but charmless, lacked. Yet there was one lovely old house we looked at with a real estate agents in tow that had so much of the previous owner's presence in it—murals on the walls and permanent changes that so reflected her personality—that I knew the house would never truly be mine. It was as though her spirit had not released the house for anyone else to truly occupy it.

The house we bought didn't give me that feeling. It is grandmotherly, old enough to have seen it all, unflappable, accustomed to weathering storms and children, and able to transcend the moods of the temporary residents, whomever they might be. This house welcomes us, loves us, and keeps us safe from harm.

This house doesn't fight me.

I have often wondered if I still haunt the other houses I've lived in. There were some unhappy spells where I cried too often and too much, so much that I'm sure my tears soaked into the floorboards and the plaster on the walls. I hope that sadness doesn't affect the women and children in those houses today. I hope that my ghost only sprinkles fairy dust on the children while they're sleeping and helps the women find what they think they've misplaced. I hope that my spirit hovering there has found the peace it couldn't find when I lived there.

Riding by some of the places where I used to live is a strange, unsettling experience. If the house looks better than I left it, it feels like a judgment against me. And if the house is in worse shape, the feeling of vindication lasts only a few seconds before it's replaced with a nostalgic sadness for the time spent there and all that wasn't as it should have been at the time.

Is it our creativity, squelched for the sake of family and obligation and duty, that holds these houses together? Can that frustration be transformed into joy without destroying the mortar that holds our homes and families together?

In a world where even Diane Chambers on "Cheers" was left to decide if she could write a book OR marry Sam, as though marriage precluded any possible success as a writer, we still have a belief that a wife and mother somehow will and ought to channel all of her creative energy into home and family and that to pursue her own dreams and develop her own intellectual capacity is somehow boorishly selfish, it's no surprise that a woman who wants to pursue her art must still fight for the money and a room of her own necessary to create.