Looking Back on a Sacred Place ~ by Efton Jiles, Sarasota, Florida

The walls were the color of butter, with tall windows looking out over the terrace below and the Italian countryside beyond. The old plank floor creaked, solid under foot but aged, under a fine wool carpet. Not a large room, but high ceilings and heavy cornice gave the feeling of spaciousness. Facing south, the windows were hung with a golden translucent drapery that cooled the light filtering in, illuminating my room more like candlelight than sun. Between the windows was an old drop-front secretary, honey color wood, the drawers and niche above the leather writing surface framed by black painted columns. A small sleigh bed with horse-hair mattress, a large tapestry upholstered chair and the bookcase filled the remaining space without crowding. The bookcase was populated with all manner of books, hundred-year-old Baedeker travel guides to place that no longer exist, a novel or two, read or half-read, a couple of fine, slip-cased editions of classics and a few tattered paperbacks. Above the built-in wardrobe was a old portrait of a handsome young hunter, dressed in green cloak and with a red feather gracing his cap. Hanging at the head of the bed was an gold and silver embroidered vestment, flat and pressed on velvet in its carved wood frame.

It was my room, a place no one else ever needed visit. The thick stone walls kept it always the same temperature, sweltering summer or fog-chilled winter my room was constant. To open the door was, for me, to escape to stillness, to refuge. The air was always still, always perfumed the same by dried aromatic herbs in a porcelain bowl resident on top of the secretary. I seldom turned on the small wood-carved chandelier, painted green and red like my hunter companion looking down from the wall. A bedside lamp with tea-color linen shade gave light enough for the nothing I always went there to do.

For twenty years my room changed very little. I had found it that way when I arrived, made it my own over time with a few curated mementos arranged, then rearranged on the bookcase or secretary's writing surface. The last day I left that room to go downstairs, then, not knowing, go on to another life, I remember looking back as I closed the door, grateful for the rest I had had there. It has been sixteen years now since I last closed that door. What became of my clothes in the wardrobe, or the few relics around the room that spoke of me, I do not know.

The room is still there, in my memory, unchanging, a sacred constant, a very sacred place.