In my own childhood home, a tunnel-like closet connected my parents’ bedroom to the one I shared with my sister. The closet was great for hide-and-seek or stashing secret treasures among boxes of who-knows-what. It was popular with little friends who came to play. Scrambling through the dresses and shoes with a playmate was like exploring Tom Sawyer’s cave or the tombs of the pharaohs.
My Grandmother Daisy’s cherry wood, cedar-lined trunk was another childhood nook that held mystery for me. It always stood at the end of her bed in her basement apartment holding the few material keepsakes of her long life—elegant turn-of-the-century feathered hats and flapper dresses with matching beaded bags. The contents have disappeared, but the trunk itself has become a prized possession, now used for storing my own collection of costumes from around the world. It also holds several lengths of filmy, lacy fabrics I plan to sew into artsy pillows someday. The trunk is a niche for memories and dreams alike.
I wished for nooks and crannies for my own children once they came along, but the closest they knew were antique armories, among the most necessary pieces of furniture for people of past centuries. These were large cupboards for hanging clothes and storing linens that often had intriguing details inside—sometimes cubbyholes or false backs for hiding valuables. It was through one of these that C. S. Lewis’s characters entered the world of Narnia in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; perhaps my girls imagined Lewis’s stories better for the large Armour in our home that always held paper and art supplies, books, and stacks of magazines.
Niche is one of my favorite words, not only because it fits neatly on the tip of my tongue, but because I love what it implies. Have you found your niche in life?Do you market your services oraproduct to a particular niche?
One delightful niche for me is that one stair “in the middle of the stairs” that appears in the lovely poem “Halfway Down” by A. A. Milne:
I’m not at the bottom,
I’m not at the top;
So this is the stair
Where I always stop.

Tags: Family

The homes in actress Debby Boone’s Burbank, California, neighborhood are small and plain. Economy Chevy’s and Fords line the curbs. There are no BMW’s, lush gardens, turquoise pools, or multistory houses.
Then you see it, squeezed between two simple ranch-style dwellings: a stunning chateau. A river-rock turret rises upward, swirled like a licorice vine between strands of red brick. Under a sloped roof are two beautiful stained-glass windows. A cherub with a broken wing kneels with its back at the front door.
When I arrived to interview Boone on assignment, she led me right into her kitchen. I couldn’t help thinking how deliciously lived in it was. Layers of whimsical children’s art, life-sized paper dolls, and funky decorations covered every inch of wall space. Boone told me that while house hunting for this home she had hoped to find space for her husband’s art projects and to raise their four children. Secretly, she hoped also for a certain amount of charm—within their price range. To prove she found just that, she later took me to the master bathroom. Pulling open a tiny door in the ceiling, she folded out a ladder that led to a small attic. All it needed, she said, was a skylight and—presto!—it could become husband Gabriel’s art studio. But that wasn’t all.
Boone’s house is fill of Old World flair, including more than a fair share of nooks and crannies in odd and unused areas. When she toured the house the first time, she couldn’t find the stained- glass bay window that looked so pretty from the outside. It wasn’t until the Realtor took her through the U-shaped closet off the master bedroom that she spied unexpected sunshine spilling onto the floor between racks of clothes.
Suddenly she knew—this was the house.
Once Boone’s family moved in, that three-by-three-foot bay window alcove, with its carpeted platform and walls covered in sunshine, became her personal chapel. “I literally go into my closet to pray like Jesus asked us to do in Matthew,” she said. “From the window I look onto the street with passing cars and people muted by the pink and green glass. The view reminds me there is a world beyond my place, and I also belong to that world.”
I couldn’t help wishing for a prayer niche as ambient as Debby Boone’s when I returned home from my visit with her. But almost no houses built in the last fifty years have anything like our grannies’ nooks and crannies. To re-create the charm of older homes, we have to add to them ourselves, inspired by alcoves we have known from other times and places. Sheltered, inviting, holding our special books and precious objects, such intimate spaces create a natural refuge.One alcove I remember was the staircase in Grandma and Pa Smith’s farmhouse. It was narrow, steep, and cold, taking a sharp left turn toward the second story, after which the stairs seemed to go on forever. As a little girl, I liked sitting on that one angled step and imagining my father as a little boy in flannel pj’s climbing those same stairs every night for bed.

Tags: Family

If your walls could talk what would they say? Create tangible ways to remind family that the daily course of life matters greatly at home.
Although most of us don’t have time for the elaborate detail that the popular art of scrap booking demands, we can take shortcuts to documenting love and laughter
Revolve family and friend photos from camera to refrigerator to the file box every couple of months. Keep the display areas in your home (the fridge, a mirror)—like your lives— fresh and ever changing.
Think in themes. Buy a photo box or use shoe boxes for each member of the family or divide a single box into seasons, holidays, or family events. Make copies of certain photos to place in themed files that overlap. Add newspaper clippings and other memorabilia (e.g., ticket stubs or award certificates) to the files.
Feed souls with memories—let children you love make place mats with photographs by gluing them in a collage on plastic pats then laminating them. Create special ones for birthdays
4 or school awards.
• Take snapshots of guests as an alternative guest book, logging their names and the date they visited.
• Be ready in a snap to capture your family on film. Keep a disposable camera in the glove compartment of your car one in a kitchen drawer another in a niche by the back door or in a jacket pocket. Send one with your child to school on her birthday or the day of a special assembly.
• Laugh a little more. Save bad or cast-off photos in a separate file for kids to make joke cards and silly collages on a rainy day Cut the photos apart and put them back together in funny ways. Stick labels with silly sayings (available in photo stores) onto the photos.
• Create stationery with a photo of the recipient scanned onto paper with a quote and contact information (your children will love this sort of personalized way to connect to their home!).

Tags: House

The walls of my home have been white for years, but last year friend talked me into colorizing one of them for a change of pace. After much resistance, and when I was guaranteed all could bb painted white again, I finally settled on terra-cotta, a favorite color. The difference a new wash of color made in my room, and on my outlook, startled me. From the moment the first stroke was applied, accenting the taupe-colored rock of the hearth, I recognized that walls are sacred backdrops to our homes. Better put, walls are backdrops to our sacred lives. It is appropriate and inevitable that changes in our lives be projected on them and documented in a variety of new ways and new looks.
Each time I’ve moved from a home, I’ve prayed for a graced presence to remain there. I believe such a presence lives on somehow in the walls, like honeycomb for the next occupants. As I move on, I’m certain I’ll come up against a number of walls. Perhaps I’ll hit a few of them going full speed and be knocked out cold. But I’m reminded that Jesus walked through more than a few. When Jesus’ disciples met in fear behind locked doors after his resurrection, he transcended the problem of the locked doors and simply appeared in their midst. The same thing happened again eight days later. “And there are also many other things that Jesus did,” says the text of John’s Gospel.5
When walls seem like obstacles to what I want, I need to stop and ask what Jesus would do. His understanding of matters is complete and profound, but just before he ascended to heaven, he declared that even in our imperfect understanding we are to be witnesses of him. Surely the walls of our homes serve not only to protect and enclose us but to allow us to transcend the visible and material world as witnesses of God’s grace and power. Every time I step to stretch out the curtains of my dwelling and lengthen my cords, sparing not, God is with me—and the walls are listening.

Tags: Personal

The walls of my house are built with three-by-six boards instead of the usual two-by-fours. Sturdy and stout, these walls have listened to my children’s prayers. Armchair mystic that I am, I believe the prayers of my children have become ensconced in the corners and crevices of their rooms and have made our home sacred space on earth.
Novelist Sue Monk Kidd gets at this in The Secret Life of Bees, in which Lily listens to the bees who live in the walls of her room. Lily says, “I imagined them in there turning the walls into honeycombs, with honey seeping out for me to taste…. Despite everything that happened that summer, I remain tender toward the bees.”3 It is as if the bees themselves perform the ritual blessing.
As a reader, I am left to ponder the symbolic meaning of life that goes on in the walls of the houses that hold us and silently wait for us to listen back with tenderness. I wonder what the walls of your home communicate about you, and I wonder if all our walls are really just backdrops for the silhouettes of our lives.
When I think of “silhouettes,” I think of those Victorian silhouette pictures framed in metal with bubble glass that depict couples involved in elegant activities like dancing or riding in a horse and buggy. Wouldn’t it be an intriguing twist if all of our family moments were being preserved as shadow pictures on the walls of our homes?
When the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the shadows of objects and humans were cast permanently on walls by the radiation. If your home life were to become a permanent silhouette in a dramatic, show-stopping moment, what would the shadow picture look like? Would you want to make any changes?
I’m sitting within my walls today, warmed by the heat from the wood stove and pondering these questions for myself. When my family dwindled at two-year intervals from five to four, then three, then two, then one, it was like an earthquake followed by a series of aftershocks. Shortly before my youngest left home, I began putting up baby and childhood pictures of her and her sisters on the walls. I needed to be reminded that an awful lot of warm family happenings took place here. Shadow pictures of raising three children have surely been burned permanently onto the walls of my psyche. I just wanted to see them in color again.
I wonder now what pictures will replace this family motif and motivate me to move ahead to the next big thing.
As our lives change, so do the spaces we live in, says designer Sheila Bridges. In her book, Furnishing Forward, she encourages designing and decorating our homes so that they are completely in sync with these life changes.

Tags: Home living

An electrical short (nickname for short circuit) can cause blown fuses, tripped circuit breakers, even fires. A short occurs when a bare!i hot wire touches a grounded wire or metal, or sometimes when water gets into electrical equipment. Shorts occur in wiring or in appliances. Overloaded circuits blow fuses. Try to determine the cause. The last appliance you turned on may have a short, or it may just be one too many. Count up the wattage of appliances and lights operating on that circuit. Divide wattage by 120 to determine amps being drawn. Maybe you can stagger appliance usage to eliminate overloading. If the circuit isn’t overloaded, suspect the appliance. Plug it in somewhere else. If it blows that fuse or circuit breaker, repair or replace the appliance. Don’t discount the possibility of a faulty receptacle. Repair it. Turn off the power for that circuit. Remove the outlet) ver. Verify that power is off by testing the connections to the with your neon tester . If it lights up, don’t proceed; call an electrician. Once power is off, take the receptacle from the outlet box. Look for an exposed wire. Tug on the wires. Tighten any loose ones. If the receptacle looks damaged, put in a new one . Replace the outlet and cover plate. Switch or the electricity and try the appliance again.
If you can’t locate the problem, phone for service. Water spots near the wiring indicates a leak, possibly in the roof, and suggests wiring damage. This kind of repair calls for a licensed electrician.

Tags: Home living