Thresholds of glass
07 June 2010 11:34 AM Categories: Animal/vegetable/mineral
It’s impossible to hide anything in this house. Even the attic space, something that we can only reach with a ladder that my husband drags into the living room from outside, has two windows, one on the front of the house and one open rectangle directly over the living room. But we still pack stuff into these spaces, boxes of old photographs (so useful for blogging) and books we mean to sell, clothes from my office days. I've sewn single-panel curtains for some of the doors, but in the closets it has been easier to staple burlap roughly to the inside, a way to hide the disorder within, if I do anything at all.
Over the last week we’ve sold some of this stuff on craigslist, carseats and breastfeeding supplies, the artifacts of our son’s infanthood, perhaps showing both an acceptance that he will most likely be an only child and a desire to jettison the things we carried with us across thousands of miles.
What will happen when the earth shakes beneath us, when the house jiggles and pops? I just discovered that we are in a liquefaction zone, which means the ground under the house isn't as solid as it appears, that in an earthquake the earth will take on the qualities of water. Before we moved here, I worried about living in a house where every threshold was marked with glass -- even the stairs and kitchen have glass-paned doors -- where there were 11 skylights and 31 windows. But then I got complacent, because that's what happens when nothing happens: who knows when the next big quake will hit? At least our son’s bed is no longer under skylights. He sleeps safely beneath a solid ceiling, though when he slips into our room he's stuck under glass with the rest of us.
Maybe it’s better to live in a dark space where the secrets can hide behind thick wood, locked against the discovery, where they won’t come spilling out when the world shows its instability. But we’re stuck with the openness for now, with the light, with all the riskiness that openness implies. Here are my secrets, boxed and contained in glass. We live with the danger, with the fact that it could shatter in seconds, that we will be crunching across shards after the tremors.
We have 19 glass-paned doors in this house. The slideshow above shows most of them -- if you can actually see the slideshow. Whether or not looking at slides of glass-paned doors is a worthwhile activity, I'll leave to you. But I do like the soundtrack.
Top image: the closets in our bedroom.
From a prompt, "Inside the closet."
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