MAPLE DRIVE
Some things are disturbing for reasons we may never know.
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The stolen moments with an executive daddy were encapsulated in a beige sedan, the molecules of my admiration for him escaping from the window that served as a perch for his cigarette-cladded hand.
Our destination led to what was formerly open Kansas Prairie where a regal hunting lodge once stood. Daddy would build the contemporary split level of his dreams nestled in the backdrop of this former wheat field and I was his co-pilot.
I am profoundly aware that this is the most-likely genesis of my obsession with concrete, drywall, and exposed wooden beams.
This home was the petri dish of beautiful and hard things for a nine-year-old pigtailed little girl. I think now that homes both envelope and imprison us. We get to choose which.
My daddy’s masterpiece was meticulous. His love, poured into every corner, held me when the people living within failed to rise to the surrounding’s mandate for perfection.
I had forgotten [or suppressed] nearly all the sadness of the unmet expectations, not of blueprints that rose to majesty, but of those who in their own humanity disappointed one another and themselves.
It was the freshly-painted home directly across the street that started all of this—me recalling with a measure of anxiety how Daddy nearly lost his mind when the new neighbors built a “barn” home Right. Next. Door.
Today, I sit in this little sun-bathed office intended for “talking it out” picturing my childhood neighbor stopping his lawn mower and running down his impressive grassy slope to my car. “Little Janene Knox!” How could he have known me after decades away and apart?
He invited us in and for the next few hours the four of us [him, my husband, me, and God] spoke of impossible and forgotten things, him remembering it all.
After fifty years I learned the details of a mommy’s and daddy’s separation. How Mama would dress me up and Daddy would take me for ice cream. How is it that I had tucked this away?
I recalled this tender senior man weep as he shared a real and present despair over having watched his neighbors in that impeccable modern masterpiece slowly fall apart—
The exposed beams.
The giant clear story windows tucked under the jagged roofline.
These held the gravity of a young girl’s sadness while her world caved in.
What strikes me now is not so much the miracle of our family’s ultimate restoration but the lie of invisibility that I believed—
We closed the windows.
We cut the hedges, mowed the impressive lawn.
I, seemingly alone in my despair, helplessness, grief.
And still the man living right next door knew the silent sadness of a little girl…carried that sadness on behalf of her for all those years.
That sadness I have quietly and covertly carried was released this week.
In a new neighborhood I never imagined would be mine.
Through the impossible, unbearable choice of a red-bathed dwelling in direct view of my new favorite chair.
The Gift—that led to putting away and letting go of a little girl’s deep desperation in a home built on the Kansas prairie by her beloved Dad.
I do not begrudge Maple Drive. It held me in the most forgotten and unforgettable season of my life.
Perhaps this is why homes and I are kindred. I have lived their cradling through the stormy nights. I long to embed them with beauty, peace, love.
In stark honesty, I have prayed multiple times with streams of tears washing the mascara down my face that God would give me just one more project—
Maybe a 1940’s bungalow with a wrap around porch.
Instead, he plopped me right across the street from the red barn house and asked me to see and then release.
What do you need to release?
Beyond my identity in my Creator, houses have always been the thing of me.
It’s difficult to move into someplace that hardly needs attention, at least it doesn’t excessively ask for the sacrifice of hands.
Yet, here is what I have been reminded of—it needs my care,
not of plaster, and beams
but of the people residing there.
How many homes like a pioneer on the prairie have I transformed?
I have counted twenty-three.
It seems I’ve earned this respite from dust, mold, chronic debris.
The chaos surrounding and within have subsided.
At least for now.
NOTES:
We are kindred in our belief that things, hard things, need attending.
But what of the things that slip our soul-view—
The ones so consequential that we can hardly believe we’ve forgotten them?
Do the impossible things merely slip our mind?
Or, like a good good Father, does He hold onto them for us until He believes we are ready? I am crying as I type that last line.
How like him to use architecture to speak to me, the language of my heart.
It has been there from the beginning—this insatiable need to create.
How does He speak to you?
Are you allowing the difficult conversations in?
It’s startling and remarkable that we don’t have to invent them, or beg for them…the right words…and word-pictures…come when we are ready. In his time.
Next week I am going to talk about the 4am wake-ups and the insatiable need to get things done. And then, just maybe, I will write a book containing all the revelations that came enveloped in each of twenty-three dwellings. Whew! Twenty-three chapters seems like way too many. Are you ready?
Image: This red barn home, freshly painted just two days ago directly across from our new home. At first the reaction was distress. And then something else entirely— a recollection needing attention settled in. His unanswered prayer [of giving me another project to sacrifice to] forced me to look straight into what needed healing, apparently the color of red. We are right where we should be even when we feel lost. Perhaps without first believing it, I will find myself here after all.