Happier at Home Read online

  As we were walking home, I asked myself, “Why do I love Dwellings so much? Why do I feel such a fierce attraction to it?” One key lesson I’ve learned from my happiness project is to pay close attention to any flame of enthusiasm. In the past, I’d often ignored a surge of interest. I’d admire some object or be fascinated by some topic—but I wouldn’t think much about it. I’ve come to realize, however, that I don’t have so many passions or enthusiasms that I can afford to ignore any of them. I kept thinking about the miniature, hidden landscapes of Dwellings, and suddenly I had my idea, and made my last-minute resolution to “Create a secret place.”

  “Wait. Listen to this!” I grabbed Eliza’s arm. “I have the greatest idea. Let’s put a miniature landscape somewhere in our apartment. Let’s make a tiny scene—hidden inside the medicine cabinet, or on the top of a bookshelf! That would be amazing.” I could envision it perfectly. We’d open up the kitchen cabinet to reveal, not a set of dinner plates, but a tiny mountaintop.

  “Yes, that would be great!” Eliza immediately understood exactly what I had in mind. “But the thing is,” she added, “it would have to be really good. We can’t make anything that good.”

  “Right,” I nodded. “We want it to be really beautiful. But how will we find something? I have no idea.”

  “Maybe Charles Simonds has more pieces.”

  “Yes, but his work goes in museums. It would be too expensive. Maybe there are artists—not even professional artists—who make miniature scenes. But how do you find them? It’s not like they’re listed somewhere.… I’ll have to do some research.”

  “Can I look, too?”

  “Of course!”

  That evening, when my mother called, I told her about the Simonds piece and about our determination to put a miniature scene in the apartment.

  “I’m looking at Dwellings online now,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Imagine what it would be like to open up the kitchen cabinet and see a cliff dwelling! Or to have a secret mermaid scene in the medicine cabinet.”

  “Like Narnia inside the wardrobe,” Eliza called out.

  As I was talking, Eleanor drifted over with a worried face.

  “Mommy, we have a problem,” she looked grave.

  “Just a minute, Mom. What is it, Eno?”

  “You’re telling Bunny that you want a miniature scene. But you know how much I love to play with cunning little things. If you get that, I’ll want to play with it in my area.”

  “Well, that’s true,” I told her. “I’m glad you raised that issue. We’ll have to think about it.” She was right, she would want to play with it. We’d deal with that later.

  Over the next several days, I did research. I asked for recommendations on Twitter and Facebook; Eliza and I did a search on Etsy.com, a site that sells handmade pieces; and I sent a few emails to art-loving friends. I made a note to rent the movie Tiny Furniture.

  “Look at this,” I said to Eliza as we searched online on separate laptops. “It’s called tilt-shift photography.”

  “Is it a way to photograph miniatures?” she asked, looking over my shoulder.

  “No!” I answered. “That’s what’s so interesting. These are photographs of real scenes. The tilt-shift technique makes everything look like a miniature.”

  “Could we do that?”

  “Maybe! We’ll learn more about that when we’ve figured out miniatures.”

  In the end, I found a person, right here in New York City, who did the kind of work I envisioned.

  I’d put a message on Twitter: “I’m looking for artists (& I use that term broadly) who do beautiful work in miniatures. Suggestions?” An acquaintance sent me a link to Jacqueline Schmidt’s work, and I was immediately enthralled. I emailed her, then spoke to her on the phone. She seemed to understand exactly what I envisioned. When she came over to look at the space, we talked about possible elements: a view of a mountaintop, with bluebirds (my personal symbol), daisies (Eliza’s symbol), butterflies (Eleanor’s symbol), and blackberry bushes (Jamie’s symbol), with a brook or pond, bright clouds, a half-hidden tree house, a nest with four eggs—a fantastical, Maxfield Parrish-ish mountaintop, not a realistic mountaintop. After some further conversation, she agreed to get started.

  I was thrilled. Soon we’d have a miniature scene! Hidden inside our kitchen cabinet!

  “How much is all this going to cost?” Jamie asked that night, as I was enthusiastically describing these plans.

  “Remember when we said we should buy something special to celebrate our fortieth birthdays?” I responded. “We never got anything. This is what we should get.”

  “Okay, sounds good,” he said. “But what about losing that prime cabinet space? Where’s all our stuff going to go?”

  “I’ll rearrange everything. It’ll be fine.”

  Then I tried to put the miniature scene out of my mind, because I knew it would be a long wait before it would be installed in our kitchen.

  After I’d realized that I loved miniatures, I saw that I’d loved them my whole life. For decades, I’d prized a tattered museum booklet about Colleen Moore’s Fairy Castle, the exquisite miniature house exhibited at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. As a child, and even more, as an adult, I’d loved the striking picture books of Dare Wright: The Lonely Doll, Take Me Home, The Little One. I’d cut out a Wired piece about Lori Nix, an artist who builds and photographs miniature scenes. When we’d visited Disneyland last summer, my favorite ride had been Storybook Land, with its miniature fairy-tale settings. I’d bought (and in September, abandoned) that mountain scene to build with Eliza.

  When I identified the pattern in many things that caught my eye—miniatures—I was able to embrace and build on a passion that I’d somehow never even noticed before, a love of dollhouses, birdhouses, bonsai, model villages, aquariums and terrariums, maquettes, the boxes of Joseph Cornell. If I’d been paying attention, I might have perceived it long ago.

  But while I loved miniatures, an even deeper yearning—something fantastical, almost mystical—was satisfied by my vision of a mountaintop hidden inside a kitchen cabinet. I wanted to create a secret place.

  Without understanding what I was doing, exactly, I’d already created one secret place in our apartment. Several years ago, after a minor renovation created an odd, awkward area, I decided for no apparent reason to hide that space behind a panel that swung open only if pressed in the right spot. Once it was built, in what felt like an ancient impulse, I put one of my favorite framed photographs of my family on the inside shelf. I would rarely see it there—but all the better. It would be the more powerful, hidden.

  I loved the secret place, but I’d never thought much about it—why I’d wanted it, or why it gave me so much satisfaction. It was only after reading Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language that I recognized my desire for a secret place as a universal instinct. In Alexander’s scheme, pattern number 203, “Child Caves,” is followed by number 204, “Secret Place”: “Where can the need for concealment be expressed; the need to hide; the need for something precious to be lost, and then revealed?” To address this need, A Pattern Language advises: “Make a place in the house, perhaps only a few feet square, which is kept locked and secret; a place which is virtually impossible to discover—until you have been shown where it is.” Which is exactly what I’d done. Why? In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard explains, “There will always be more things in a closed, than in an open, box. To verify images kills them, and it is always more enriching to imagine than to experience.” Some of Joseph Cornell’s boxes include a drawer, permanently shut, with a feather or jack inside. This secret treasure has always struck me as extraordinarily significant. With my hidden cabinet mountaintop, we would have another secret place. The four walls of my apartment could contain the vast natural world. Only my family would know it was there.

  I’d been thinking about this secret place for weeks before I noticed the name of the Simonds piece that had l
aunched me in this direction: Dwellings. The theme of home had again asserted itself, in a way that seemed almost too symbolical to be believable. Sheesh.

  Wholly apart from the quiet pleasures of gaining a deeper appreciation of art, and the fulfillment of a lifelong mystical yearning, my quest perfectly illustrated one of my Secrets of Adulthood: I do best what comes naturally. When I pursue a goal that’s right for me, my progress comes quickly and easily; when I pursue a goal that’s wrong for me, my progress feels blocked. Now I try not to fight that sense of paralysis, but rather see it as a helpful clue to self-knowledge.

  I’d first noticed this Secret of Adulthood in other people. “How did you figure out how to animate your slideshow presentation?” I’d ask with envy. “How did you find a place that serves rum-raisin rice pudding?” Such accomplishments seemed utterly baffling to me. “Oh, I don’t know,” people would answer vaguely. “I just asked around. It wasn’t that hard.” It sure seemed hard! But when people asked me, “How did you figure out how to get an agent and start a career as a writer?” or “How did you manage to drive traffic to your blog?” I heard myself answer the same way. “Well, I just did some research.… It wasn’t that hard to figure out.” When I started blogging, I enjoyed building my skills. In September, I’d found it easy to arrange the wisteria painting for my Shrine to Work.

  I used to tell myself, “I should learn more about art. It’s beautiful, it’s interesting, it’s fun!” But I somehow couldn’t figure out how to approach it. When I paid close attention to what caught my eye, to what I looked at with pleasure—not what I thought I should like, but what I actually did like—I found my obsession and the way to pursue it. I had so many claims on my time, yet I found myself spending hours looking at the work of certain artists. I didn’t have to resolve to “Suffer for fifteen minutes” or find other ways to motivate myself to achieve this goal. I couldn’t get enough.

  Christopher Alexander remarked, “It is hard, so terribly hard, to please yourself. Far from being the easy thing that it sounds like, it is almost the hardest thing in the world, because we are not always comfortable with that true self that lies deep within us.” Be Gretchen.

  The last days of April were chilly, but gorgeous; we hadn’t had any heavy rains, so the pansies and tulips in the flower beds still kept their petals, and the magnolia trees looked magnificent. It was a beautiful time to be a tourist in New York City.

  Since February, my interest in the sense of smell had exploded, and I’d recently read about a perfume maker, Christopher Brosius, who was known for creating reality-based scents that capture certain experiences and images. Brosius had founded Demeter Fragrance, which I loved, and now had a perfume line called CB I Hate Perfume. Intrigued, I’d ordered samples of his “Burning Leaves” and “To See a Flower,” which I found entrancing, and when I learned that Brosius had a perfume “gallery” in Williamsburg, I vowed to visit it in person—an outing that would allow me to practice my driving, embrace good smells, and be a tourist, all in a single morning. Fortunately, I have a close friend who shares my fascination with good smells, loves a good New York City adventure, and, more important, in case I suffered a nervous collapse, knows how to drive.

  It took us a few weeks to make the trip. First I had to reschedule, then she sent me an email: “Turns out I have to be somewhere that morning. Can we go at 2:30?” First I answered, “Sure.” Then I sent her a second email: “Only to you can I reveal the depths of my lameness. I’m so skittish about driving. Can we go another day, in the morning? I’m worried about rush-hour traffic.”

  “Of course,” she replied immediately.

  I couldn’t wait to visit the shop, but I dreaded the thought of the drive to Brooklyn. What if we got lost? What if passers-by laughed at me while I was trying to parallel park? What if I became overwhelmed with anxiety? The night before, I had a long nightmare about driving.

  But the trip was wonderful. My friend was imperturbable, reassuring, and gave great directions from the sheets I’d printed out from MapQuest, because I still hadn’t quite mastered GPS. I found a parking spot right away. We arrived before the store opened, so we sat in a hip Williamsburg coffee shop and talked for an hour. And the shop! The small store had shelf after shelf of shining, tempting bottles. We sniffed from each of the dozens of samples many times.

  She discovered “On the Beach 1966,” “Hay,” and “Black March”; I discovered “A Memory of Kindness,” “Tea/Rose,” and “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday” (“the salty breath of the breeze off the Mediterranean, driftwood, rocks covered with seaweed and the smell of old leather suitcases”). She bought some gifts. I bought three additions to my Shrine to Scent.

  “I love New York,” she sighed as we crossed back into Manhattan over the Williamsburg Bridge. “So much to see, so many places to go.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know. It’s all right here. We’re so lucky! Here, smell.” I stretched out my arm in front of her.

  “Hay?”

  “I love it. Love, love, love it.”

  “Here, smell,” she said, and held out her arm.

  “On the Beach 1966? I love that one.”

  The next day, when someone asked me, “Isn’t it a lot of effort to follow all your resolutions?” I thought back on that visit—the anxiety, the triumph, the beautiful scents, the adventure with a friend. “Sometimes,” I said, “but the thing is, I’m happier when I do.”

  The day after we made that trip, on the phone with my father, I mentioned that I’d been doing some work on organ donation (my father has a famously enthusiastic nature, but CB I Hate Perfume would be a stretch for him).

  “You’re pretty busy these days,” he observed.

  “Yes,” I answered. “I’m a little too busy, and really I don’t know all that much about it, but this is just something I want to do.”

  “That’s the best way, just to do what you want to do. Young lawyers come to my office, and they ask, ‘What should I get involved in?’ They’re trying to be strategic. They’d like to build the kind of practice I have.” My father, who’s involved in innumerable business, political, and civic activities, is the kind of lawyer who makes a career in law seem fun. “I tell them, ‘Don’t do what you think you should do. Get involved because something interests you. If you aren’t interested, you won’t do a good job, you won’t stick to it. I got involved in politics because I wanted to, not because I thought it was the smart thing to do. So if you’re interested in organ donation, it’s great to be involved in some way.”

  There it was again. Be Gretchen.

  May

  NOW

  Remember Now

  “Safe! safe! safe!” the pulse of the house beats wildly. Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.”

  —Virginia Woolf, “A Haunted House”

  - Now is now

  Kindergarten was almost over, sixth grade was almost over! My calendar was full of end-of-year entries: “Kindergarten farewell party—bring OJ,” “Buy teacher gift card,” “Sixth-grade picnic,” “Arch Day,” and my least favorite, “Camp health forms due.” Where had the time gone?

  I remembered those first bright days in September, when Eleanor and I had explored her kindergarten classroom for the first time. In those early days of autumn, Eliza had still walked to school with us. No longer.

  It was hard to believe that summer had almost arrived. On the first warm weekend morning, I told Jamie, “I really want to take the girls to the Central Park Carousel this weekend. Eliza’s been there just once in her whole life, and Eleanor has never gone.”

  “Fine,” Jamie said, “but what’s the rush?”

  “We’ve got to do these things now. It seems like we have forever to go to the carousel, but Eliza is twelve years old! She’s practically too old for a carousel; maybe she already is. And Eleanor is six. We should go now.”

  “Okay,” he said. “We’ll go today.” (But in the end, we didn’t go, and we still need to make that vis
it to the carousel.)

  I looked at the fresh, clean May page of my Resolutions Chart. If only I could keep my resolutions perfectly this month, the last month of my happiness project! Before long, the iron routine of school would lift for a few months, but I didn’t want to relax my vigilance about my resolutions.

  On any particular day, I sometimes wished I could forget about my resolutions. I wanted to work, not visit the Museum of the City of New York with Eliza. I didn’t want to take the time to hold open the door for the slow-walking woman or even to say a polite “Hello” to the other parents at morning drop-off. I didn’t want to dig deep, or respond to the spirit of a gift, or suffer for fifteen minutes.

  But my life is happier when I keep my resolutions. One evening, as soon as I walked in the door, I gave a preoccupied wave to Ashley, our sitter, and Eleanor as I hurried to scribble a note to myself (if I don’t write down important things the minute they occur to me, I never think of them again). As I was writing this crucial note with a broken blue crayon on the back of a school strep-throat notification, Eleanor marched over to me with a scowl.

  “You didn’t give me a warm greeting!” she said bitterly. “When I said ‘Hi,’ you just said ‘Hi’ and didn’t pay any attention to me.”

  “Oh, sweetie,” I said, kneeling down. “I’m sorry. I wanted to write myself a note before I forgot something. That’s why I seemed distracted.” I repeated one of our catchphrases: “Give me a hug, Ladybug.”

  Several of my resolutions reminded me of my happiness paradox “Happiness doesn’t always make me feel happy.” Did driving make me happier? Yes and no. Before October, I almost never thought about driving, and when I did, I felt a mild sense of uneasiness. Now I thought about driving frequently, and with active dread.

  “I really want to get over this anxiety,” I told Elizabeth on the phone one day. “I’m actually driving, which is progress, but I want to be free from the fear.”