My step-daughter has spent this week moving into her first house. During the process of unpacking, she’s sent us pictures of the little islands of order she’s created, each one surrounded by a flotilla of boxes. Her experience has made me think of the whole process of making a house into a home: shoving the furniture around until it looks right, picking paint colors, figuring out to fit your pots and pans into the cabinets. (And wondering why in the world you packed that hideous thing rather than dumping it at the local recycling table…)

I do all those things, but first I set up little shrines everywhere.

I don’t mean literal shrines, in the sense of Catholic or Hindu shrines, with gods or saints surrounded by candles and flowers. (I have to confess that I’m a sucker for those, too, regardless of denomination or even of tackiness—although bad plastic flowers will put me off). By “shrines,” I mean little collections of stuff that reminds me of places, events, and people I love. Yes, it means I’m sentimental. (People say that word like it’s a bad thing….) But I’m not completely indiscriminate: in my own home, the colors and arrangements still have to please my eye.

In this preference for the personally meaningful, I’m not unusual. Lots of people pull beloved decorations out of storage at the holidays, setting up a menorah or creche or tree-topper that’s been handed down through the decades. But it’s not just a holiday thing. My mom used to hang her grandmother’s quilts in the guest room. One friend has a wall of ancestral black-and-white photos in the dining room. Another friend hangs large, elegant photos of the place she spent summers with her kids.

When I was younger and moved around a lot, I carried with me a box of small oddments. They included a four-inch Singer sewing machine used by my great-grandfather as a model on his sales rounds (it will actually do a daisy stitch). The box also included my grandmother’s well-used rolling pin (she made fabulous pies for a succession of unpretentious cafés patronized by cops and firemen) and a few photos (including my graduation photo from college, with a bunch of hippie-esque twenty-somethings on the grand stairs of our Colonial-era classroom building). When I moved into a new place, I always unpacked those things first. They immediately marked a bare room as mine.

Though I haven’t moved in twenty-five years, I still mark my territory. My study is crammed with photos and small aides-memoire. Here’s one corner:

There are shells from our land in Nova Scotia, a tile from one of our favorite shops in Annapolis Royal (the town closest to our cottage up there), a gorgeous old copy of Paradise Lost that my students bought for me, and a pair of battered German figurines I chose from my grandmother’s many collections of dust-catchers.

My husband does it, too. Here’s a corner of his desk:

The pebbles in that dish remind him of a magical day at a church in Italy. We were sitting on the terrace of the abbey church of San Miniato, above Florence, admiring the glittering mosaics on the facade of the church. A German boy of about three years old toddled over to us, holding a pebble. He solemnly offered it to us, and with equal solemnity, we thanked him. He toddled back to his parents, picked up another pebble, and gravely brought it to us, too. This continued until we had quite a pile of pebbles. The boy never smiled or spoke—the task was clearly not frivolous business to him. Eventually, his parents waved to us, picked him up, and started back down the hill to Florence. We continued to sit there, buzzing with happiness, feeling as though we’d been blessed by a small local deity. My husband pocketed the pebbles, and there they sit on his desk.

Most of the art in our house, too, reminds us of places we’ve traveled or lived: a poster from an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museum we visited on our honeymoon, a photo of exuberantly painted Adirondack chairs in front of an ice-cream store in Key West, a print of a soulful-eyed cow by Dubuffet (my first purchase when I moved into my own place after divorcing my first husband). The only one of any value is a huge antique poster from a café in which I wrote much of my doctoral dissertation; it was my gift to myself for finishing the damn dissertation.

I don’t always notice these objects, of course. For weeks at a time, they fade into the background. Then one day I notice this one or that one, and it makes me smile. But even as a half-ignored backdrop, I think they lend warmth to our house. None of these objects make the house grand and certainly not decorator-perfect. They just make it ours.

So, are there things in your home that make you smile with their associations and memories? 

9 Comments

  • I love these little vignettes! Although I don’t like clutter, I find homes without well-loved items displayed or things here and there that evoke fond memories, to be so cold and impersonal. I really love your cow… a symbol of when you mooooooved on?

    • Ha ha! I think it was the sweet, soulful, non-judgmental eyes, looking from one creature to another. (I found the live version later, when we got a Portuguese Water Dog.) But moooooved is very funny!

  • I once interviewed the playwright Tennessee Williams and just as our sessions were ending he asked if I wanted to see his shrine. Sure, I said. He had a small room of the living room where he has a table covered with a cloth on which he displayed a candelabra, a Madonna, some votives and a photo of his sister who had been subjected to a brutal surgery she was young to excise her crazy thoughts. Above the table were three paintings done by Williams’ lover, Frank Merlo. The author sank down in a rattan chair (this was in Key West) and wearing only his swimsuit and a robe and sunglasses, he poured out an entirely different deeper version of the stories he had told earlier. It was breath-taking. I have a picture of him in that setting above my desk.

  • When I was taking Latin, we encountered the phrase “Lares et Penates,” which was translated “household gods.” Apparently, Roman homes sometimes had little shrines for these deities, whose task was to see over and protect the household and its members. I never really understood exactly who or what these second-tier higher forces were, but, reading your thoughts, I realize now that almost all homes even these days have versions of these shrines. In our home, the Pebbles of Miniato are only one of many. They evoke who we are, where we’ve been, the people we’ve loved, the journeys we’ve taken. They give us a sense of coherency in a vast universe and comfort in the little eddy of time we’ve been given to experience it.

  • gWow, Nancy spending a week here in my hometown, Cincinnati, for my nephew’s wedding and my step-dad’s 100th birthday party, I’m relying completely on visual memory here, but I know our home is chock full of such evocative objects. A particularly poignant one for me is a framed photograph on the mantel in our bedroom of my brother, beaming and confident, on the day he graduated from medical school. Draped over the photograph is a necklace with a cameo locket, which he bought me the first Christmas after our father died when I was 14 and he was 9 by pocketing his lunch money for a month. He went on to be a terrific husband and father and he built a very successful practice in OB-GYN in Middletown, Ohio. And yet, we lost him to suicide when he was 56 because he felt he was losing his touch as a surgeon because he had nicked a woman’s bladder during a midnight C-section a few days before. If only he could have seen the people lined up for 2-3 blocks to pay their respects at his funeral and tell us stories about how he had saved their babies, saved their wives, saved their own lives. I think that qualifies as a meaningful shrine. And I know there are plenty more. As you say, they make a house a home.

  • I love the pebble story. What a nice memory every time you glance at it. I have little items sitting around that remind me of trips taken, a coaster from Durango, CO, items on shelves and a travel magnet collection. I have a small notebook cover that I tore off a notebook while settling my mother’s estate last year. It has four quotes that she wrote on the inside cover in her handwriting. I have it sitting in a giant paper clip paper holder on my desk. Makes me think of her every time I glance at it. I also have an old china cabinet from her that is filled with odds and ends she had collected including dishes, bird figurines and three cast iron pig banks. Another great reminder of her.

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