A Wall For An Instant Of Happiness

An article written in the Sunpapers last year about a man’s home and its décor and his ability to decorate it etc. quotes him and he says “home is where your mind resides.” This is a wonderful description of our home, whatever kind it is. It can be a single family home, a condo home, a townhouse home, an apartment home. It is still home and as the saying goes, “home is where the heart is”. In a former article, I called it “a home is our castle.” Just as the kings and queens in foreign countries call the palace their home; any place where we put our shoes, our purses, our children, pets and money into; this is our palace.

I have seen some palaces in my traveling times to Europe and though the outsides are quite pretty and adorned with unusual architecture, it is what is inside the home that is important. In the decorating section of the Sunday papers, everyone has their own and unique ideas as to what their home should look like. Some decorate (like me) the walls of every room as if it is an art gallery. There are not only paintings, glass covered frames with prints in them, box frames, pictures of our three weddings, mine and my son and daughter’s too, pictures from my young years with Mom, Dad and my brother, dozens of photos of my darling grandchildren, pictures of my late two Pekingese doggies, pictures of me ballroom dancing with my coaches, pictures of my husband and I dancing and many other events that I frame and hang on these walls. I also frame the headlines of each and every article written for the Patches and Frederick News Post Community Columns. This is 651 to date.

Walls if they could speak would tell many loving stories and some sad ones too. I have framed photos of my mentor and friend from when I went back in 1968 to get a college degree, the late Dr. John Levay and his wife too. I have framed the last few notes from my dear, late friend Virginia L. Woerner with her greeting cards to me exclaiming what devoted friends we were for sixty years. I have thoughts by dear friends who sent me notes about my writings, my and our dancing days. My most recent framed one is from my dear dancing friend Steven Behr and his partner Mary Peterson dancing at a performance they gave recently in Washington State.

Anything you know, I have framed. It is hard on dusting days, removing dust and placing them back where they reside. It is worth the house work keeping them clean.

A home without ornaments on the wall is a bare home in my opinion. They say that Warren Beatty had a home with nothing much on the walls. I started ‘framing’ when my kids won awards in elementary school and up through high school. I bought frames by the dozens and had them in colors to match the room it was going to ‘live’ in.

A picture on the wall, whatever kind it is, no matter its cost, expensive or from Walmart or Target means the world to the home owner. A picture relives the former times and brings to life the actual event.

When I married over fifty-three years ago, I bought something that was new then. It was called 3 D photo slides. Even after all these years, it is delightful to bring out the leather case, slide the slide in the 3D holder and there is the wedding again in its full glory. The pictures on the slides come to life in 3 D form and you can feel as if you can touch the person, the wedding cake, the table with food on it and you want to hug all the long gone people who no longer are here including Mom, Dad, brother Herbert and the many aunts and uncles who came there. Dad thought it a wasteful amount of money (that I paid for, he paid for the rest of the wedding) and it cost one thousand dollars back in 1960. It is well worth the money, because the memories are alive and they do reside in my mind still.

My friend Steven mentioned above said in a note to me “you are being read by many types of readers, all of them reading them with different lenses.” This is true about life in general. When we read something, we get a different view on it, maybe than another person reading the same words. In looking at old photos or slides, you remember the event with great emotion, most of the time, love and most importantly delight, that you are here to view or read it. All of these things on the walls, photos, cards, comments in letter form, describe who we are now and who we were then.

Dad was wrong when he thought the slides a lot of money for me to spend; it was and is well worth the cost because the memories are being read by me, the viewer with the lenses of my eyes with clear vision as to how my life was enriched by seeing all these slides, wall photos, wall cards and events in frames to remember them by.

As Mr. David Snyder said   “a house is where your mind resides”, so the residence is full of happy moments, dear memories and a significant twinkling of time. The time is an instant of happiness, we have recorded in our mind and we can now view it hanging on the wall or looking at it through a slide instrument.

 We reside well with our mind intact and our thoughts of devoted remembrances. Our lenses are clear and our mind resides with these visions.  “Memory is the library of our mind.” That was said by Francis Fauvel-Gourand. Let us visit this library often.