Posted by Elizabeth

In keeping with our unscheduled House Week (I swear Anne and I didn’t coordinate the previous two posts, we’re just that in sync with one another), today I’d like to talk about miniature houses.  Or, as the rest of the world so crassly refers to them, dollhouses.

Two weeks ago I took a trip to the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, one of my favorite museums, which houses the world’s largest collection of folk art.  As I strolled through Nuevo Mexico: El Corazon de la Cultura, I was stopped in my tracks by not one but two hand-made adobe dollhouses.  One in particular captured my heart, a perfect representation of a Northern New Mexican homestead.  Tiny kiva fireplaces hunkered in every corner of the house, and its builder had lovingly painted intricate designs over the mantles.  Diminutive retablos, perfect replicas of religious iconography typical of the area, hung neatly on the rough-hewn walls.  Little chile ristras, looking like shiny red Tic Tacs strung together, lined the portal.  I’d never seen anything so perfect.  I wanted to make one.

I rushed home, full of vim and vigor, and immediately Googled, “How to make an adobe dollhouse.”  Not surprisingly, the query didn’t return any results.  As it turns out, Maikael didn’t share my enthusiasm for the project, although I can’t figure out why.  Can’t you totally picture a giant adobe dollhouse on display in the middle of our living room?  I tried to plead my case.  “But I’ve got all that dollhouse furniture in the garage that’s just sitting in boxes.  Wouldn’t it be neat to do something with it?”

Between the ages of 12 and 15, I went through a major dollhouse phase.  For Christmas, my parents bought me a six-room dollhouse, with space for renovations in the attic.  The house, which boasted a gigantic wrap-around porch and was wired for electric, had been custom built and commissioned at our local miniatures store, First Ventures.  (Looking back, I can’t believe that tiny Kent, Washington, could support such a specialty shop.)  Like most real-life houses it came unfurnished, but interior design was the fun of being a miniatures hobbyist.  To get me started, my mother hand-sewed the family that would live there; just like my real family, there was a Mother, a Father, and a Baby Girl.  I named them The Man (Mann?) Family:  Mr. Man, Mrs. Man, and Baby Man.  This is what happens when you give a 12 year-old an opportunity to name things.

Given the style of the house and the clothes my mother had carefully chosen for the family, I quickly determined that my house existed in a Midwestern 1930s farm community that had somehow evaded The Great Depression.  For the next three years I would spend all of my time and money creating a detailed world for The Man Family.  I poured over the glass cases at First Ventures filled with tiny, nesting Fiestaware bowls.  I attended Saturday classes, where we spent hours creating elaborate holiday tables (I hand-rolled these napkins and inked the holly leaves myself).  My mother carted my friend, Nikki (the only other person I knew with a dollhouse), and I around to miniature shows on the weekend, where vendors from all over the country gathered to peddle $20 chocolate chip cookie sets, complete with shiny metal trays and irregularly-formed dollops of cookie dough.

Not surprisingly, my favorite room was the kitchen.  The larder was always stocked with canned vegetables and bottles of bright green beads (peas, obviously).  A freshly-iced cake always perched on the counter, waiting for Mrs. Man to cut and serve.  I had a butcher block before it was trendy.  I would spend hours holed up in my room rearranging the furniture, making things just so, a stark contrast to the real-life household around me that often felt disorganized and chaotic.  It was a chance for a kid to call the shots, to control the physical environment, to reinvent her surroundings – and herself – in the process.

As I look back, I’m struck by something I didn’t register at the time.  Although dollhouses are often associated with little girls, Nikki and I were often the youngest members of those Saturday classes, two teenagers hunched over holiday place settings in a sea of women.  It is an expensive hobby, one which adults have the means to support (most 13 year-olds simply aren’t willing to part with their hard-earned babysitting money over a five-piece lemonade set that costs $15).  But I’m certain it goes deeper than that.  What is so captivating about miniatures, for adults and kids alike?  What is so fascinating about seeing our world represented in miniature scale?  I think it must have something to do with feeling like we’re in command of a tiny, contained world; that with a sweep of a hand we can right what’s wrong, fix what’s broken, turn a life upright again.  It orders things in a way that we often cannot do ourselves.  What feels too big to hold is suddenly within our grasp.  Miniatures reflect our world, yes, but in a more ideal form.  Given the tumult of my life these days, it makes perfect sense that I’d be drawn back into the world of miniatures at this moment.

This morning I dug through a steamer trunk to unearth my miniatures.  The house was sold long ago at a garage sale, but I couldn’t bear to part with its contents.  I’m not one to get sentimental about stuff, always clearing the decks for something new; perhaps it’s because I routinely watched my mother send the relics of my childhood out the door to Goodwill.   The miniatures are one of a handful of memorabilia that I took when I left Seattle, unsure of when – or if – I’d return, and I have dragged them around the country with me ever since, carefully packed in crumbling shoeboxes.  “Maybe someday I’ll buy another house,” I argued, knowing full well I probably never would.  I expected to feel a wave of emotion and nostalgia as I peeled away the brittle newspaper to glimpse at the hutch, the kitchen table, the pantry, but I didn’t.  The chairs were cruder than I remembered, the glass jars not nearly as accurate as I recalled.  Why had I bought a box of 1970s-looking packaged cocoa for an early 20^th century farmhouse?

It wasn’t until I pulled The Man Family out that I felt something.  How many hours had it taken to stitch the tiny cherries to Mrs. Man’s apron, or to weave the bun that sat atop her muslin head?  How long had my mother spent crafting Mr. Man’s slender red ribbon suspenders, or painting his black shoes?  What about the sweet bunny emblazoned on the Baby’s jumper?  I saw something represented in those dolls that I never noticed as a kid, something that clued me in as to why I had been carting that furniture around since my mother died six years ago.  My mother, who often struggled to express herself to me in words, had reflected her love and care, perfectly, in miniature.