"Womb with a View"
Painting by Alison Goodwin, Portland, ME
In these first weeks after arrival as summer fully launches, I’m itchy to get into the garden, to walk the shoreline or wooded trail. Much of my time, however, has been occupied by houses. This one, needing to be put back together after its major winter renovation project, our Illinois house currently offered for sale, and my father’s house out in Arizona that in just a few weeks will have a new owner.
Truth is, I’m often occupied by matters relating to my house. Not just maintenance and repair – years ago, I discovered that no summer season here is complete without a plumbing problem – but my house’s design and décor, an interest that could be dismissed as trifling. A concern too slight. The pursuit, some might say, of a useless beauty. Even architecture, we’re reminded by Alain de Botton in The Architecture of Happiness, is not free from a degree of suspicion. Doubts, he claims, have long been raised about its seriousness, its moral worth and cost. Indeed, many of the world’s most intelligent people disdain such interest and equate contentment with “discarnate and invisible matters instead.” A somewhat contradictory notion, however, acknowledges how much our identities are indelibly connected to our locations, are influenced by our surroundings. How a house can more than just hold us but shape us like a shell its resident snail.
To critics who would sniff at my pursuits, to how I spend time not just over what piece of furniture goes where and from it at what perspective I wish to look out window or at computer screen, but on the chair itself, the comforting shape and fabric upon which I plunk my bum, I offer up in a defensive crouch: “Yes, but I also work here.” Here is where, as a writer, I attempt loftier subjects, higher planes of thought. I’m defined by those thoughts my words make manifest, but also by the language of materials, colors and objects within my house. Through them, I declare to others: this, too, is who I am.
I welcome my linkage back to ancestral gatherers who squatted beside a stream bed harvesting greens, and who in their cave homes couldn’t resist picking up a stick or whatever was the equivalent of paintbrush or chisel. I’ve long been fascinated by prehistoric cave paintings, their simple but sophisticated animals figures, though I’m most taken by images of red ochre hands, splayed palms not so much traced as pressed against cool rock. It’s been theorized many cave pictographs were the creation of shamans. But I’ve got my chips down that at least some of them were done by women, perhaps while pausing in the midst of performing other necessary tasks. Were they, I wonder, a claim of ownership, a form of identity? An early human insistence that our houses, no matter how primitive, are our biographies? Or might they be evidence of our ancient and persistent-through-the-ages urge to create, to make what is ours beautiful, even in times of peril, out of whatever is at hand?
A house is a child’s first universe. Out of sofa cushions, appliance cartons, a pink flannel blanket draped over iron porch railings, a “house” is one of her first creations. French philosopher Gaston Bachelard tells us: “A dreamer of houses sees them everywhere.” She also coaxes.
For years, in a shallow hollow beneath spruce trees not far from this house, I’ve invited our visiting grandchildren and nephew to build miniature “gnome homes” out of forest and beach finds. They drop cross-legged onto the forest floor with gathered birch bark, mussel shells, sticks and balsam cones. They tramp shore and woods, landscapes rife not just with potential building supplies but houses themselves. In the wrack above the high tideline, taking a page from Bachelard’s playbook, I hold up a whorled, spiral-ridged dogwinkle shell and say, “Imagine living in here.” Within bleached, corrugated outer walls, in a single room deeply lustered like an old silk lamp shade in subtle variegations of lavender, orange and pink, a spiral staircase climbing to a small turreted tower. At a nearby pond, they become convinced the snapper turtle roused from its log has retreated into its shingled one-room watery palace of dark glossy halls dimly lit by a single lamp.
A house protects the dreamer, Bachelard claims. A house, sheltering the imagination, invites reverie. It’s a world within worlds, a personal cosmos. Indeed the house in its concrete physicality and as metaphor invites many essential musings. But first, and throughout history, whatever its type, however primitive its form, a house helps insure survival.
Little did I know that much of what has always attracted me to particular houses including this one is due in part to what geographer Jay Appleton calls the inherent need we hunter-gatherers possess for prospect and refuge, for outlook and shelter. A refuge from which to spot peril or tonight’s dinner. A “womb with a view.” Small wonder then that our species seems to have evolved by having long ago bunked down in savannah landscapes, home to open vistas and sheltering trees.
I credit my husband Bob with first heeding that ancestral pull when we considered buying this house. Prospect tugged first and hardest on him. Somewhat predictably, studies show men are drawn to the familiar domain of hunter while we women put effort into refuge, into those spaces too often disparagingly labeled as “domestic.” A big bright space with broad view is one definition of prospect, and that we’ve got in spades here, as became apparent the first time we saw this place. But the snug-and-protective-haven aspect of things? It mattered little to Bob that the kitchen of our possible new house was in need of major renovation. Or that the living area with its narrow width would limit furniture placement and pose challenges for looking out from a comfortable chair to the enviable prospect which, following one brief circuit of this house’s interior, he’d collapsed onto the outside deck stairs to more properly and at length ponder. He didn’t question as I did the sudden disappearance of our long-held dream of a snug New England Cape or a classic cedar-shingle camp or a rambling and worn saltwater farmhouse. In this contemporary-styled refuge, I sought some likely alcoves and nooks in open, high-ceiling spaces. On multiple-windowed walls, I searched for places to put bookshelves, hang art. Was he not horrified by the color palette (yellow, pink and green – and on a Maine island for Pete’s sake, signifying perhaps other less obvious flaws?) or by the shag carpeting, including in (what were they thinking?) the bathrooms?
That afternoon, we’d quite unknowingly fallen into lock step with men and women who for millennia preceded us, including, more recently, my parents. One summer afternoon of my adolescence, as my mother and I drove off to look at paint and fabrics for her latest café curtain re-do of the bedroom my sister and I shared, we waved to my father busily hauling out pruner and shears. By the time we returned, the mere buzz cut he’d promised to give the evergreen border had morphed into the near elimination of those sheltering shrubs, my mother’s attempt at a privacy screen, and he’d already retreated back into the garage with its engines, gadgets and sharpened tools of the hunt.
Bob of course was right. Not that a contemporary-styled, shed-roofed house with shortcomings not easily fixed was my first choice. But that over time we’d work to coax out of it the havens we needed to sleep, eat, laugh, welcome family and friends, heal illness, lick our wounds. We’d change colors, rip up carpet. Later, we’d install new cabinets, take down a wall, add another. And the prospect of the unbounded sea and sky our house looks upon? It has never needed any assist from us.
