Mature Focus February 2022
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Mature Focus, Inc. is a monthly newspaper, distributed to the greater Quad-City area, Geneseo, Muscatine, Aledo, DeWitt, Iowa City, Coralville, Cedar Rapids, North Liberty, Solon, and Tipton. It is designed to inform, serve, and entertain mature readers. Publication of columnists' views, as well as advertising herein, does not constitute endorsement. Mature Focus reserves the right to reject or edit any advertising. Letters to the editor must be signed and include the writer's address and phone number for verification. All letters must be received no later than the 15th of the month preceding publication. Annual subscription - $25. See page 12. 2022 Mature Focus, Inc.
Publisher Kevin Ferris P.O. Box 1031 Moline, IL 61266-1031 (309) 277-2000 email: kevin@maturefocus92.com Facebook.com/MatureFocusQC
Read the digital edition at mature-focus.com
30 YEARS CELEBRATING
February 2022 Vol. 30 Issue Number 10
Layout Design Tonya Ranum Associate Publisher Schary SantAmour
By Susan Goldfein In 1928, in a lecture at Oxbridge, Virginia Woolf stated that in order for a woman to write (fiction) "a woman must have money and a room of one's own." The financial aspect was to provide a woman with a degree of independence, and the room to provide a space "utterly free of distraction and interruption. A room with a door, and preferably a lock." Fortunately, in 2022, unlike their status in 1928, many women now have some degree of financial inde- pendence. A room of one's own, however, is not always that easy to come by. For the ten or more years that I've been writing these essays, we lived in a two-story house, just my hus- band, myself, and more recently, Sam the dog. My husband's office was on the second floor, and my workspace was on the first. While not a room that was completely my own (in the evening, it morphed into the TV room), it did have a door which, when shut, succeeded in eliminating the voices that resonated throughout the house when said husband had his iPhone on speaker. Which was all the time. Silence is certainly more conducive to writing than overhear- ing a discussion of how one per- formed at a recent round of golf. But, as many of you know, we recently moved. We traded our two- story house for an apartment, which, like most apartments, is on a single level. We chose this apartment because the living space seemed more than adequate for the three of us and the occasional visitor. Good closet space, more than one bath- room, and a kitchen in which we could sit down and enjoy a cup of coffee. What I failed to consider, however, was my continuing need for "a room of one's own." With Virginia Woolf's warning res- onating in the small speck of gray matter which comprises the creative area of my brain, I scrutinized the apartment's floor plan again and again, trying to discover space I could call my own. "How about our bedroom?" my husband generously offered. (He had already claimed desk space in the room we were using for a den.) "It's large enough for your comput- er." I graciously declined, as I imag- ined my tranquil bedroom strewn with papers and mail that I would get around to organizing. Soon. "So how about the guest room?" was the next suggestion. "We don't have guests that often." And we'll have them even less often, I thought, if I have to share my space with Cousin Irving. (We don't actually have a Cousin Irving, but you get my meaning.) So one by one I eliminated other suggestions, like the walk-in closet or the dining room table. However, the dining room table was a serious contender for a while considering that in South Florida making dinner reser- vations is a way of life. But no, it would not do. In desperation, I scoured the floor plan one last time, and suddenly the proverbial light bulb turned on in that - Goldfein, turn to page 23
A room of one's own (with apologies to Virginia Woolf)
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