Santa Sabina

I noticed after a day—and I realized this suddenly, in a conversation with one of the other workshop writers—that my recall of names and words came easily again. I woke every morning and remembered: I was in San Raphael, in what had been a convent; I was reframing my story of California.

I had a second-story room with all I needed in the world: a single bed with a blue blanket, a nightstand, a light over the bed, a desk for writing and a comfortable chair by the window.

And the window, which looked onto the garden and forested hillside, was open. Sometimes I heard another guest cross the gravel path below the window. In the night, horned owls called to one another, and the statue of the Virgin glowed white against the grass.

The wardrobe, built into my room, hid the hallway view of a small, functioning radiator, and my own sink and medicine cabinet, with the mirror on the inside. Except for the vinyl flooring around the sink, the room featured a thin, light carpet. The only picture, of saints, hung over the desk.

Nightlights lit the hall. The door to the toilets was directly across from my room and next to that the bath with four showers behind private doors. I chose the one by the window, and the window was open at the top, and when I saw the screen I remembered, but finally, after 35 years, without pain, that earlier California—the swamp coolers in the classrooms, 150 teenage students who didn’t want to talk about Steinbeck—that I had fled.

This private world, with my little room and big window, existed inside a great house with generous stairwells, a library, a reading room with a fireplace and walls of windows on two sides, a courtyard, chapel, dining hall. The lower world of the basement was a wonder fair of small chambers for artmaking. I could wander freely. I planned no meals, negotiated no travel. I ate in silence with the others and wrote quietly within walls radiating 90 years of prayer.

In the library, in a thin book, Some Mysteries of Jesus Christ, I found a note-become-bookmark on a piece of blue cardstock: “9:15—I’m going for a shower. Let’s go for a walk later and sit outside.”