Thursday, July 17, 2008

The Secret Message of Wallpaper



There's an old abandoned shack on my walking route that I pass every day.
It's a small place, more cabin than house, and the ceilings can't be more than six and a half feet high, as if built for a smaller people but probably constructed that way more out of economy than for the comfort of a race of short-statured people.
The place is almost hidden in the summer woods, more apparent in the less-leafy winter growth, and even though it's only steps from the road, I imagine hundreds of people drive by it every day on Highway 59 without even noticing it. I never did until I began walking that particular route.
There's something about an old, abandoned house that draws us to it and yet at the same time, is somehow forbidding. Too many horror movies perhaps, and also the possibility that something is alive in the house, whether critter or crackhead.
But I have found this little shack impossible not to explore a little bit. I don't trust the floors so it's mostly been a matter of sticking my head in the door and through open windows and what I've seen is completely unremarkable and yet has touched my heart.
It is, as I've said, small with low ceilings. It was made all of wood and some of the rooms are falling in on themselves and there's nothing left in the house at all beyond what animals have dragged in to nest with.
The one remarkable fact of the cabin is that someone, some woman, no doubt, took the time to put wallpaper up on those wooden walls a long, long time ago. Almost every room that I can see has tattered and peeling floral wallpaper, and I can't help but think of the woman who put it up in those rooms. No bathroom, no electricity in there, ever, I am sure, just wood floors and wood walls of rough planks, and yet some woman, some wife, some mother found the money and the time and the energy to put that wallpaper up, so many years ago.
That wallpaper just breaks my heart.
I pass another old place on my walk. It's a trailer in an eyesore of a trailer park right across from the post office. It's at the exact opposite end of the street where the little falling-in cabin with wallpaper is and people are actually living in that trailer.
I don't know what those people's story is but they don't seem to go to work and they don't seem interested in picking up their trash and they don't seem to ever take their clothes off the line as if the very act of hanging them up there a few months ago completely wore out their capability of having anything more to do with that particular activity.
I shouldn't judge but of course I'm human and I do, and I think to myself when I pass by, Jesus God, couldn't they at least pick up the beer bottles in their yard? I've never seen inside the trailer nor do I want to, but I have a strong feeling that no one's put wallpaper up in there and it would be a complete waste of time for anyone to do that anyway; put up wallpaper on the walls of that nasty trailer which probably can't cost more than two-hundred dollars a month to rent, and the landlord's getting away with murder if he gets that.
I lived in a trailer very similar to that one once, but it was my trailer and I had a deep affection for it and I kept it swept and put up pictures and shelves and kept children and cats and potted plants in it with a good degree of comfort and coziness.
I never put up wallpaper though. I never even thought of it.
But some woman who lived in that little cabin fifty years or so ago did.
And I wonder so many things about her. Was she black? Was she white? Did she have children? What did her husband do and where did he work? Did she sew quilts of scraps by the light of a kerosene lamp at night? Did she have a shelf of books? Did she have a wood stove to cook on? Did she have a garden, did she plant flowers? Where did she get her water from and did she set a vase of flowers on the wooden table where she rolled out her biscuits?
Where did she go when she left?
I walk by the little place almost every day and some days I don't even register its presence, but it's there, whether I notice it or not. It's just sitting there, its bones of wood falling back to the earth, abandoned by the people who lived in it, by the woman who made its walls beautiful with flowers that didn't wilt or fade and which still, to this day, give testament to someone who cared, someone who needed beauty, even in a tiny cabin on a patch of ground in Lloyd, Florida a long time ago.

15 comments:

  1. Lets see Helen write like that!
    That was good, thanks for letting me peek in the window with ya.

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  2. nice- our lives are like that wallpaper...

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  3. What a picture of extravagent beauty. And hope. Thank-you for sharing. In fact, I would be willing to bet that you could turn that post into a short story... ;)

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  4. Oh, I think that Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings probably wrote novels about that wallpaper, one way or another.

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  5. Your writing so so lyrical and lovely. Every time I come here it's like being pulled into a beautiful dream...

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  6. I can feel this little cabin in my bones now...and I too find myself wondering about who lived there - who'd take the care to put up wallpaper...who loved the place they lived.

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  7. Thanks, y'all. I appreciate your comments more than you can know.

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  8. Very nice Ms. Moon.
    My guess is the next place your unknown wallpaper hanger went was skyward...and that she did have a wood stove.

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  9. I'm sure she did have a wood stove. Somehow, I get the feeling that people came and went in that little cabin. Of course, I have no idea.
    Funny how such a small detail can provoke so much speculation.

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  13. I love this post. I wonder about people like the ones in the trailer. I always suspect substance abuse is the factor that prevents them from picking up the very obvious, visible trash in their yards.

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