Jenifer’s Shelter Island Journal: All in
I’m filing this column on my birthday. The number of which is, in fact, 78, in case you’re prone, as I am, to confusing digits.
I received my big — very big — present a few days early. I am finally in, taking up residence in my long-awaited new digs this past Tuesday in time to make pumpkin bread (my one-and-only baking specialty) with my grandchildren. Also in time to welcome my Scarsdalian family on Thanksgiving morning and prove to them that night that, with an air mattress or two and a pull-out couch, there was, indeed, room enough for them all in my new little annex, even if the main house was rented to my wonderful tenants.
This beautiful “gift” was a splendid team effort spearheaded by my enlightened general contractor, a gifted finishing carpenter, who brought together the very best framers, drywallers, floorers, painters, plumbers and electricians, etc., who, in turn, brought to life the vision of the budget-conscious but nonetheless enchanted annex my Island daughter and I dreamed up.
And, even while on a shoestring, we dreamed up a doozy.
It’s like a dream, living here now. Many of you have had the chance to have homes built but, while over the decades I’ve had parts of my old 1900 farmhouse renovated, I’ve never inhabited anything like everything-new construction, and I mean everything.
It’s like when I had my first baby. She was “mine,” but we still had to get to know one another. It’s the same with this “baby” born nine months almost to the day that we first broke ground. Exciting but more than a little scary.
Scary because, as I’ve written here before, it took many years, but finally a couple of decades ago my old house and I found we had become, well, one. Like Cathy in Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights,” when she says, referring to her wild, passionate lover, “I am Heathcliff!”
O.K., O.K., but each time I enter my old house, I feel happy, like I’m coming home to myself. Was it kind of a betrayal then to tack on a completely new structure where I would be living a completely separate life? Would it look/be awkward and ill-conceived? How could I be true to both my old and new homes?
Creating an authentic environment for myself has become just about as important to me as creating authentic relationships with other people.
As Clare Cooper Marcus writes in “House As A Mirror Of Self,” her 1995 now-modern classic: “To be fully true to ourselves may mean making changes in our lives. And for many of us, change is problematic, anxiety-provoking. But through change — whether self-consciously willed or thrust upon us — we restructure our lives and our psyches; we start to see other possibilities, new directions for our lives. It takes courage, humor, self-reflection, time and patience. We can ignore the call of the soul and still lead a fulfilling life, or we can heed its wisdom and experience times of deep joy and commitment. While we go through that process, home remains, whether in our hearts of reality, the place of security and nurturance necessary for our psyche. It remains the envelope into which we retreat for privacy and intimacy which reflects who we are as individuals and as members of our society; that is essential for our well-being.”
Ain’t it the truth, Clare!
“Home” is so much more than cement and wood, more than an address or a status symbol. How many times have we entered a friend’s house and, though its architecture and décor are diametrically opposed to what we would’ve chosen, still we feel immediately welcomed and at ease because it seems to represent so vividly the personality of its owner?
In a 2013 online essay for welldoing.org., architect Sam Jacobs writes: “Homes are more than places to live in. They might keep the rain off our heads but they also house a whole host of other issues, things that resonate with us on a deep and symbolic level, a kind of physical manifestation of all our hopes and fears. That’s why when architects are commissioned to design someone’s home, they are also hired to perform a range of way more occult services. You’re there as much to interpret a client’s dreams, intuit their desires, divine their relationships, personalities and attempt to materialize these things into the very fabric of their surroundings.”
As with “creation” as a whole, there is always more at work, it seems to me, than plans or even dreams. That word “occult” Jacobs uses —something “supernatural,” “mystical” as Webster’s defines it — is always in operation, whether we realize it or not.
After this little project, I realize it, all right.
