Houses

 

Good morning.  In the quiet of everyone flown away, I have a chance to re-read holiday cards and their messages.

Here's what comes from that:  My friend Anne writes inside her beautiful card, "I think of your house--with the brown wood of the dining room table and the wonderful red on the walls and your art also....There is no modern decorator's 'touch,' and yet the colors and the furniture are all in quiet harmony.  My friend Kitty...has the same sort of living room...the same dark and memory-filled atmosphere."  I know what she means, though I remain humble.  It's homely, that style.

She doesn't know that I have in the past few days gotten a new dining table, a fine gift (though I insist I'm just borrowing it long-term) from my neighbors Cathy and Steve, who refinished the top, built new legs and then carried it over to put it together.  The table was Steve's mother's...the one he and his sisters grew up around.  Over the years, the cherry wood had grown dark, but, once stripped of its dusky film, shines again beautifully in my room.  Though I possess no end of tables, all shapes and sizes and uses, this one seats eight, with two leaves that allow 12.  It was just what I needed.

As if Anne's words were prophetic, the tones and colors of the wood on this one reflect easily the other wood in the room, from oak floor to Aunt Vi's elaborately veneered dresser.  Flashing off those red walls (it's persimmon, actually), this newcomer finds a mirror of itself even in the paintings and pottery strewn about.

Mostly my rooms have been homing places for the inheritances of others' tastes.  Even those unrelated to us...thrift store finds, treasures left along the street...they make their way, as well, and their origins arrive with them to stay.  This last is probably what makes them fit in so well.  That, and their usefulness.  Because we are not talking about simply decoration here.

What makes a home?  At least 40 years ago, I saw an ad for Karastan carpets which sought to attract younger people whose houses were furnished, like mine, in a style  they called, tongue in cheek, "Late Relative".  Carpets like theirs, contended Karastan, would bring together the disparate items begged, borrowed, passed along, bequeathed. (Unrelated to that ad, we bought our own two Karastans back in the '70's; they were mill trials from the factory, and are still anchoring rooms here.)

Though I'm far, far from young, "Late Relative" continues my lifelong style.  I remember a visitor to our San Antonio house, who walked through until she reached the kitchen, and said, "This house...it's heimish...do you  know that word?"  I did; it's a word impossible to translate because it means so many things beyond what we would call homey...it includes that other word, homely, but not necessarily in the disparaging sense, and it takes into account all the essences, the spirits that emanate from not only its furnishing, but the way its inhabitants live and value their lives. 

Adopting other lives with value is part of it.  I seriously can't remember a single furnishing or art that hasn't fit no matter where or whom it came from.  

To wit:  lately, another gift entered my door...a watercolored sketch, painted early on in her life by Edith London and passed on to me by a friend, who attentively collects her work.  As he brought it in, he worried that it might not "suit my style".  I didn't point out the irony of that to him, but immediately put it up against that persimmon wall where it looked like it had grown there.  There, I showed him.  All the art there is will make a home here.

Really, it's its history which enlivens each piece.  Even those few we acquire in their new state we choose because something in its origins draws us...perhaps it was handmade, perhaps it is the only one of its kind because of a peculiar but tantalizing blemish, perhaps it has hung too long on the farthest-back rack in a dusty hardware store, or  under a pile of sketches meant for discard.  There is, as my sister-in-law Jean once noted, a story for everything here.  Space, too.  Anne's friend, for example, built an addition to her house to hold remnants of her father's law office. We shift around rooms to accommodate other lives.  Anne called it an aspect of "southern manners", more than the northern tendency to acquire the new, but I believe such manners sneak north when they can.  I know for a fact that they live a high life in the west.

Design by accident, you could rightly call it, but really it's design by instinct...the instinct to preserve, to add to, then to fit together the pieces of one's lives that matter.  We save lives, sometimes without knowing whose. None of us subscribe too quickly to the theory of "letting go", of the popularly considered "uncluttering" of what once were and matter.  (And no, a photograph of a keepsake is not the same as your grandmother's well-worn quilt still covering a bed for real.) We homely ones are certainly not hoarders, but we make space for things' stories to abide and be useful well into the future.

I suppose it's fitting that this post is writing itself with barely ten days to the end of the year...an historic year both personally and publicly.  I can see it in the light from the kitchen, glittering off the glass tile and specked countertops...old pottery, china from a century ago, kitchen implements dug out of my grandmother's cellar...even thin linen handkerchiefs from the 'thirties folded in a small drawer.

The other day, two friends and I chatted about a subject lately nudging at us:  so what will happen to all this stuff, these furnishings of a life, these stories, when we are gone?  Will they move on to someone else's home, making and remaking a life?  

To be honest, we didn't have a clue:  one of us was wonderfully blase' about it, another perplexed on the side of worry, and I...I've decided to suspend the long view.  For now, it's the house where I live and what and whom I live among.  It's home.

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My dear readers, I wish you a home with such spirits in it (if that is your wish, too), 

A gift of bay and rosemary...
bay to burn away anxiety, rosemary to remember

    And a very cheerful holiday season 

                                And a new year of good for us all.