My family and I have been living in our new house for five months now, and this past weekend we finally hung the majority of our pictures. I’m not sure if anyone ever said this, and if they didn’t I’m saying it now, but pictures really do make a home a home.
Our walls haven’t been completely blank. We had a few pictures on the wall to at least liven each room up a little bit, but many walls were empty. It appeared as though we didn’t have any family, and like the Unabomber – without any real family connections except the brother who eventually turned him in – lived there.
We’re not the Unabomber family, though. We just took a long time in getting our rooms in order to know where we wanted to go with all our pictures. Actually, it was just one room – the master bedroom – but they all needed to be in order before the picture puzzle (sounds like a Bill Cosby preschool program) could be completed.
The bedroom was finished with the arrival last week of a new dresser and media center, allowing us to complete our puzzle.
When we lived in Wautoma, our house had a country home vibe, so our taste in pictures and artwork reflected this. The frames were the type you could buy at most gift shops, and they did not have any type of theme to them.
Our tastes started to change when we moved to an apartment in Plover. The country home vibe no longer worked for us, and we wanted a theme. The theme we settled on: black frames. Widely available and easy to match with each other, these frames quickly became standard in our apartment.
In our new home in Stevens Point, the black frames would work well in setting an overall “black” theme. Black curtains, black appliances, black dishware, black Sony Playstation. Well, we didn’t have choice with that last one, but at least it matches. Although the frames with the pictures were the last thing to go up, they set a precedent for everything else we did.
At our Wautoma home and Plover apartment, family photos dominated the living room. Now they’ve been relegated to every room except the living room, which now has six large scenery photos taken either by my wife or me. Actually, she took all except one of them, which kind of makes her a semi-professional photographer, I think, because our living room has become a photo gallery for her work. That should count for something.
We’ve been careful not to clutter our walls with pictures. We’re fans of the “less is more” approach, but we realize that doesn’t work for everyone, with everyone namely being my mother and most old people we know.
My mother’s walls have little white space (or whatever the color of the wall might be). If there’s room to fit a picture, she’ll make it happen. Maybe it’s from years of accumulating photos, or maybe it’s just an old person thing, but she definitely doesn’t waste the space.
To this day, I’m still discovering pictures on her walls I’ve never noticed before. If you are in my family at any point in you’re life, your probably on my mom’s walls, which have now become a weird sort of visual family tree, even with the branches that sometime twist together in unexplainable ways.
Together with the army of snowmen she brings out every winter, my mom’s house is definitely a delight for the eyes. I wouldn’t want it any other way, though. It’s what makes her home unique.
Just like our taste has made our home unique. Others might not like it, but we wouldn’t want it any other way.
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Originally published in The Portage County Gazette on Friday, Nov. 11, 2011.
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