18Mar Walls of my house
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.
