Little house on the mantel
If you follow me on Facebook, you might have noticed I’ve become a builder of tiny houses. Not the kind of tiny houses environmentally conscious people move into, houses so small their owners must divest themselves of everything but a pan and a phone charger, houses so small, flies can’t change directions. No, the houses I’m building are not inhabitable. Rather than sitting on a tiny foundation, they are made to sit on a mantel.
I have been infatuated with houses ever since I was a teenager. One day, I was sulking in the back seat of my parents’ car, hostage to one of their “Let’s go look at houses” trips. I hated these outings and only went when all other entertainment options were closed to me. I just couldn’t fathom what kind of perverse joy my parents got from scoping out real estate they were never going to purchase. It was the equivalent of going to a restaurant just to browse the menu. What was the point, except torture themselves over the unattainable?
That fateful afternoon, however, I finally got it. Maybe my brain suddenly matured beyond its teenage, commodity-driven mentality and was newly able to see beauty in the abstract and the unpossessable. Maybe this was the beginning of what would be my later forays into writing and art, including the building of tiny houses. I’m not sure. But I do know that, in the way you can go from having zero appreciation of a thing to a fanatical obsession with it, I went from “Why houses?” to “Oh my God, houses!
That day, as I watched house after house flit by, I began to have some sense of their contents. I envisioned how they might be decorated, how many bedrooms they might have, whether they were warm, cozy places with low lighting and farm kitchens or cold, formal structures with unbroken square footage and too much light of the wrong kind. I saw myself in their kitchens with pots hanging overhead; in snug bedrooms with high beds and quilts; in drawing rooms with shelves lined with books; and in front of blazing fireplaces stacked with wood.
Like the Barbie doll houses of my childhood friends, every house I saw offered an imaginary refuge for an imaginary life. In this one I was a rock star; in that one I baked bread to sell at my all-soup café; in another one I was a farmer with a big garden out back; in yet another I was a writer, scribbling beneath a halo of light in the corner of the living room with a dog at my feet. This, I saw, was my parents’ architecture, a private envisioning of a life not their own.
And so I am becoming a builder of houses. It isn’t going all that well. My first attempt was little more than a shabbily put-together box with an interesting roof line but no actual roof. After that I got a brief lesson from a woman who is a woodworker, and my second attempt yielded a 12- by 14-inch cabin-like structure with an actual shingle roof but no floor. It reminds me of a cross between a house I lived in when I was 25, which looked more like a cabin, and a trailer I lived in a few years later, whose floor eventually rotted away.
On my next attempt, it took several tries to realize I had the nails loaded in the nail gun upside down. Then I built a tall, very thin structure out of mostly barn wood, with a squarish front porch. The whole thing leans slightly to the left.
“Did you once live in a relatively narrow place?” a friend asked, when I showed him a picture of the house.
It was a loaded question. “Metaphorically speaking, yes,” I said. Didn’t we all? And don’t some of us still live constricted lives?
Looking at the houses I’ve built, it occurs to me that everything I do — maybe everything we all do, my parents included — is seek out that which mirrors who we are, who we’ve been or who we might want to be. Maybe this is how we find ourselves represented in the world, or accounted for, or possibly, even, explained.
I will never know exactly what my parents saw in the houses they were drawn to. I don’t know if they dreamed up new aspects of themselves or their relationship, whether they tried on new careers, different friendships, alternate personalities or more gratifying day-to-day lives.
But there is something in the memory of the three of us in the car, cruising up and down the dogwood-lined roads of northwest Atlanta, weaving in and out of neighborhoods where we knew no one and never would, with no destination except a return to where we started, where we might, if we were lucky, see what we always saw, anew.