I’ve been noticing this dresser in our bedroom every morning when I get up and get dressed.

I think it’s both beautiful and revealing. Maria uses the top shelf, I used the rest. Her dresser says so much about her life, in a sense, it’s a portrait of her mind.

You can learn a lot about a person from their dresser, including mine.

Because of my Dyslexia, my clothes have to sit on open shelves and be visible, otherwise, I forget that I have them.  I kept buying clothes I couldn’t find, Maria designed this open shelf for me, I can see everything I have, I don’t buy many clothes anymore.

Maria keeps her jewelry and some of her favorite books on her dresser, it struck me this week as a kind of creative sculpture, and a beautiful one, dripping with ideas, intellectual energy, and meaning, just like she is.

Maria has a dancer’s spirit with an artist’s mind. She is the most voracious reader and intellectually curious person that I know, she is forever in revelation and discovery, learning all the time. She has an almost child-like passion for learning new things, that passion soon dies in most people, it burns brightly in her.

Maybe she’s making up for lost time, for all those years nobody bothered to teach her anything much because she was supposed to be just a baby-maker, off to get married and then tread water until she was needed to take care of her family as they grew old.

After all, what are children for?

I noticed she was draping some of her Belly Dancing jewelry over Alice Munro’s novel, Family Furnishing, a short story collection.  The coin belts and necklaces are worn in her belly dancing classes and concerts.

Underneath Munro’s novel are portraits by the great photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.

The books behind it are a collection of Poems – Leaves of Grass – by Walt Whitman, A Doll House, by Henrik Ibsen,  Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion,  a personal journal, Burning Your Boats by Angela Carter, and Remembering by Georgia O’Keefe.