PHOTO ESSAY: Alice's House

The Proclamation from the Porch

Along a narrow road tucked beside the inlets of Tomales Bay live Alice and Rob, longtime friends of my husband even before we married. Their daughter, too quickly grown and gone, now lives a life distant from cities back East.  A hidden driveway conceals the old house, set on a small hill overlooking an oyster farm.  Mostly I remember the skies, gray and muted with fog and cloud when we go out there.

 When we visited Alice’s house for the first time, I was enchanted with the interiors.  My love of assemblage, old houses, and poignant memories of my grandparents’ farmhouse all rose up to smite me with delight and wonder as I wandered through the rooms.

The house is  a functioning cocoon of beloved objects, some no doubt past the using, some awaiting the moment of need or want,  some required every day.

Artists I love came to mind: Joseph Cornell, Edward Kienholz, Michael C. McMillen, and my friend Kathi Flood, among others. Working with assemblage, they seem to ask:

How do we hold the past? Dear and close? Casually experienced and then disposed? Purged by forgetfulness? Struggling with recall, or plagued with it?

And the objects themselves: how they do command memory, how marvelous and bemusing a power we give them.

Do we discard, renovate, or cherish, making painful choices, acutely aware that once they’re gone, no recovery is possible.

 But those artists don’t actually live in the attics of memory they have created; Alice’s house is at once life and assemblage fused, a wonderland of exchange between utility and decoration.

Alice's daughter, Isis, studied very seriously as child and young woman.

 There’s a roughened starkness that shades and compresses the nostalgic quality: raw wood waiting for paint, wallpaper half stripped, plumbing renovations underway.  Changes complete when they will.

How I loved seeing all the layers of living, wondering about the objects’ history.  Why that bowl? That teacup?  Was that your grandmother’s portrait? And all the toys: some rest, their use completed, while others wait to resume play should a determined child appear, a Toy Story only privately told.

Oh, Alice, did you let anything go?  You stayed in one place and let the years of living accrue gently, each year’s acquisitions mulching the high ceilinged rooms. You are reluctant to edit the memories, I think

  Did you intend display at all?  Or is the loosely webbed order I sense only mine, imposed upon the objects chosen first by need and want, then configured and arranged to speak for themselves?

It’s a marvel, your memory garden of intimate possessions, sheltered by the dark old home, and nurtured richly by long keeping. 

How pleased I am that I was allowed to make these photographs and write about them. See you soon, Alice and Rob!