From about 2012-2015, I was a staff writer for the lovely and thoughtful Curator Magazine. That publication is saying a quiet goodbye, much like other favorites of mine—Ruminate, Image Journal. I am grateful to the Curator for housing some of my most meaningful work. Here is a version of an essay that ran in 2015:
When I was young, I buried myself deep in an attic corner, huddling under layers of quilts beneath dusty rafters that creaked in midnight winds. After a while, I crept downstairs for a cup of hot cocoa and a tomato sandwich, worrying about hurricanes. Later, a strange woman clad in sodden boots and layers of endless scarves blew through the door. Was she a tramp? Was she a witch? I wouldn’t know until the end of the book.
If my actual, embodied childhood was full of roomy suburban houses with fluffy cream carpets and fresh new furniture, I spent just as much time in the countless rooms inside books: Cynthia Voight’s bayside, marsh-lined farm in Homecoming and Dicey’s Song; Susan Cooper’s Grey House in Over Sea and Under Stone; Madeline L’Engle’s two-hundred-year-old New England farmhouse on the hill in the Time Quartet—including A Wrinkle in Time, in which young Meg Murry escapes her wind-torn attic for a kitchen sandwich, only to meet with the strange Mrs. Whatsit. Growing up, my imagination passed into these houses again and again.
In my adult brick-and-mortar life, the very real houses I’ve lived in also seem countless. I’ve gone from the 1970s ranch house and mid-80s new construction of childhood to college dorm room then apartment (and apartment, and yet another apartment) to mountain Arts and Crafts bungalows to quaint 1940s post-war cottage—and now back to 1970s ranch house. Our current rental home echoes the ranch-style floor plan from the first ten years of my life: a paneled front living room with dining and kitchen to the back, the straight-shot hallway and its arsenal of doors. But the walls in this house are thin as cardboard, and the wallpaper is weird. The tile upgrade on the kitchen floor is nice; the lavender paint choice overwhelms the senses. I long for escape. Fiction will do.
But my imagination will not bend far past the walls between which it grew up. Most of the houses I imagine out of books—Meg’s attic-topped home, Dicey’s clapboard farmhouse, Howl’s moving castle—morph on the indoors into the earliest, familiar floorplan of my childhood, wood paneling and all, with all the real memories it holds. The doorway from kitchen to living room is always in the same spot for me, however the author might describe it differently. Meg’s mother stands on that threshold to call her family to dinner. I stood there in my pajamas on a January evening in 1986, watching the TV screen with a horror I couldn’t understand while news reels showed the space shuttle Challenger exploding over and over again in the sky, a schoolteacher aboard.
Fiction, it turns out, is not always meant for escape, and home cannot be counted on to hold at bay the winds that blow. I ask myself: what if the actual walls that housed my imagination’s first forays had been any different? What if my childhood home had borne tattered-down walls, worse than these current lavender ones, cracked and crumbled from the bad foundation of, say, a broken family or a cruel moment in history or a hungry bank account? What if, more awful still, there had been no walls at all? What then?
*
In his memoir The Gates of November, Chaim Potok and his wife meet a stranger outside a Moscow Metro station on a January 1985 evening. The Potoks have traveled to this city through bitter cold and in careful silence to visit a man they have never met. They follow him through the dark, snowy streets.
The Potoks are in Soviet Russia, and when they arrive at the man’s apartment building, the stairwell has
“the air of an old New York tenement, but with no vivid sounds of life drifting out from behind closed doors. Here you wanted to walk on tiptoe, expecting a sudden leap out of the violet shadows by figures demanding to know what you were doing there.”
But then the Potoks enter the apartment:
“It was a fair-sized room that served as both a living room and a dining room, the air warm and stuffy, the floor covered by a rug, the slightly shabby genteel look not unlike that of the rooms in which I grew up in middle-class neighborhoods of New York. In front of the couch stood a table with seven place settings.”
They enter a home.
The family the Potoks have met are the Slepaks, heroes in Jewish circles for resisting the oppressive Soviet regime during the 1970s and 80s. The Potoks are in Moscow to encourage the many Jews who are risking their lives. They have made this trek around the world simply in order to say, “We Jews in America have not forgotten you or what you have done.”
Who would travel such a long way and through danger just to tell strangers, “We know you are here. You are not forgotten”?
The Potoks stay only for the evening. It is a visit rich in conversation, and together the families share a Shabbat dinner. Though Potok recalls that a “consuming desolation lay upon the room,” yet in the same space a “warm intimacy settle[s] upon” the gathering, “a quality of familiarity and closeness brought on by a shared table.”
Potok recounts a piece of advice he once heard. He says the “only true question we ought to ask one another is: ‘What are you going through?’” This question can be asked anywhere. It can be asked in a desolate Russian tenement across the effort of a language barrier, or on a front porch with peeling paint and rotted steps. It can be asked of a nine-year-old girl watching a tragedy on TV that she can barely understand. It can be asked in any room in which people sit together and remind one other: “I know you are here. You are not forgotten.” How much does it really matter what color the walls are, or what square footage the floor plan?
He says the “only true question we ought to ask one another is: ‘What are you going through?’”
*
Today, my husband and I are painting over the lavender walls of our ranch-style rental house to make it feel more like home. I feel desperate for a home of my own, one whose freshly-minted green kitchen paint won’t get passed on to a stranger after the lease is up next summer. What is it I actually want in my desperation to own a house?
In his book A Place of My Own, Michael Pollan describes a response to houses that is more than just intellectual appreciation of architecture. He talks about our “unconscious experiences of space,” our “immediate, poetic responses to place” that make us want to be in one particular building and not in another, and this is what I want. I am trying to find a place feel like home.
I hear an old pastor of mine gently admonish: “Of course you don’t feel at home here. No place on this earth is going to fully be home.” I think of the character Dicey in Voight’s Homecoming as she sits at her grandmother’s long farmhouse table:
“‘How do I know you’re not going to rob me?’ her grandmother said. How could she know? Dicey thought. The people in the houses were in just as much danger as the people outside the houses.”
A house in and of itself is not the answer.
I hear Dicey’s revelation, and I hear my pastor’s admonition, but that doesn’t mean I like it. What is the point of yearning for a home if some piece of eternity can’t break into this present reality and illuminate ordinary days with a sense of belonging, of comfort, of peace, of history, of safety, of meaning, of home in all its best iterations?
But I read too much into my pastor’s words. He only meant for me not to look for perfection in my communities. Dicey and Potok get more to the point. Home is for seeing each other more clearly, for walking into danger, if necessary, to accompany each other in the raw and inexplicable circumstances of life, as well as the sweet and pleasant ones.
*
I return to the architecture-scapes of my imaginative youth. At the center of them is Bag End. In Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo and company are far from his cozy hobbit hole (“Home is behind, the world ahead”), and oh, how they miss it. They sing songs of perseverance: “apple, thorn, and nut and sloe, / Let them go! let them go!” They are sojourners, and so am I as I move from home to home throughout the years.
Will it yet happen that I arrive at the place Bilbo discovered when he finally returned home and “was quite content”? It sounds glorious: “the sound of the kettle on his hearth was ever after more musical than it had been even in the quiet days before the Unexpected Party.” I don’t know.
A more important question is answered in the words of poet Carl Dennis. Wherever I rest my head, I’ll remind myself, as I’ve done before, that
“whatever [I] might do elsewhere,
In the time remaining, [I] might do here.”
Wherever “here” is, whatever the walls that house me, whether they be lavender, green, or otherwise, I resolve to pay attention to the person nearest me. I will turn to her and ask, “What are you going through?”
That beautiful house. I feel like I know just what goes on there!