I love being in nice hotels. I love spaces where everything is planned and accounted for. It also makes me feel closer to my mother, to understand what she was trying to do with our house. My father, too.
Our house was a bungalow in Pacific Palisades when my mother bought it. She was twenty-nine. They planted a lemon tree and a fig tree and a ginkgo tree and a princess tree. My father painted all the perimeter walls to look like peeling adobes, their layer cakes of plaster paint. He heaved glass brick into sledgehammer holes until he had caught laminated in our foyer walls the ocean itself. Deaths and taxes took the place before I was thirty, and took the endless quest for betterment.
My mother came from a home “with no books.” Literally unimaginable to me. A two-bedroom apartment in Flatbush. I can only picture it as the stark white boxes behind my mom in old photos: kitchen shaped, living room shaped, doorway shaped. There are no other objects to lend weight, or carry the eye. Just my mom and her sister and their ink blot faces.
I describe this picture from memory. I have no photos of my mother from childhood. I have almost no photos of my mother at all. The fire took some. I deleted most of the rest. Scared the man I was living with when I did it. Knew then I could escape him. They took up too much room. Grief couldn’t fit with them there. And I couldn’t stand up till the grief had a roof.
Both my parents believed in character and self direction. They were both auto didacts, although my mother had formal and advanced schooling, she very much drove and directed her scholarship herself. My father simply devoured written words. Both of them valued frames, squares, stages, boxes. Places to put things into, onto. Tableaux.
The forces governing exquisite space are finite and primal. They vibrate to what must be angels of better nature, if output is to coincide with effect. In admiring these places, I find the shapes of my parents’ souls. Broad. Ratioed. Expansive.
Ghosts are where we find them. And all we ever build are gardens and graveyards.
Just beautiful. 🩷🌟