Rooms I Remember

Making the first little house was a lark. At the time I lacked direction. And so, with no particular plan, I began taping pieces of cardboard together. When I finished, the cardboard resembled a house. I painted the cardboard to look like brick, covered it with beeswax, carved into the wax, then added more pigment, more wax, and walnut ink. When I pushed straight pins up through the floor, I suddenly remembered how often I felt as though I was walking on eggshells as a child.

I realized I hadn’t made some random house.

I’d made my childhood home.

And I fell in love with the tiny thing sitting on my worktable.

So I taped together another house. This time I had direction, even if I still didn’t understand where the work was leading. It was only after I wrapped part of the exterior in burlap and buried it beneath a second thick layer of wax that the memory surfaced. I was standing once again in Johnny and Pearl’s cramped living room. Pearl handed me a glass of her sweet homemade birch beer before reaching for her dobro while Johnny tuned his guitar. My stepfather played beside them, and my mother sang.

That’s the secret these little houses have taught me. I can’t tell them what they should become. I can arrive with curiosity, but not certainty. My job is simply to keep making until the work reveals itself. When I trust that process, the houses seem to gather their own quiet energy. The moment I try to force them into an idea I’ve already decided upon, that energy disappears.

I never know which home I’m building or which room I’m remembering until the walls are standing and the surface begins to speak back to me. Only then do I recognize it.

Oh… this is Beckie’s bedroom, where we talked about boys and listened to Elton John.

This is the Lynnport living room where we did somersaults across the carpet.

This is Grandma’s kitchen, where we played endless games of gin rummy.

Some houses wait. They haven’t remembered their room yet, and I’ve learned not to rush them. They may sit unfinished for weeks or months. Some may never find themselves at all. They may need to be dismantled and built into something else.

I’m learning that’s part of the work, too.

What I don’t want is for these houses to feel manufactured. They can’t become ‘little boxes made of ticky tacky’. So for now I’ve stopped building them. Instead, I’m spending time with cold wax collage, returning to the familiar language of tarnished metallics, worn papers, and translucent layers of tissue. It feels a bit like visiting an old friend. The work is no less demanding, but the challenge is different. Sometimes stepping away isn’t abandoning an idea. Sometimes it’s simply making room for the next memory to find you.