This thing is about time, I know that now.

We are always moving through life, changing and morphing. We forget others are moving too. Parents seem locked in amber, immutable, permanent. They’re not of course. The dollhouse is a time capsule that snapshots my mother at a moment in her forties, all the things she found interesting, some to be discarded, some to be followed further.

From this distance I know things she didn’t, the omniscient eye above the house – I know how her interests changed, I know what happened to her, ultimately. Here in the dollhouse she’s just in the river, bobbing along, having a great time. I’m much older than she was then. I’m looking at it all with the perspective of age, a measuring cup of time always at hand.

In archaeology, you can only understand the site from what is left behind. I mentioned earlier that this is really one giant dig for me, an excavation of a society I didn’t understand fully at the time. The frozen set of objects she left behind is all I have to interpret. In a normal dig, you’re moving down through time, through layers of soil. Near the top are the most recent things, the deepest are the oldest. What’s oldest is what’s most important, most remote, most worthy of study. The layers are interesting, but more like gift wrapping.

I’m working backward, or sideways. I started with the earliest artifacts in a pristine site and am working forward. By going beyond restoration, and into creation, I’ve overlaid my own layers on hers, and in the process destroyed the original site. Well, that always happens in a dig – you record what’s there, then backfill. Then a supermarket goes on top.

To torture the archaeology metaphor even more, my alterations are almost grave goods – things loved ones leave behind in remembrance, to speed the dead on their journey. People used to be richly buried, with jewelry and household goods. It is the custom today to bury women without jewelry, but I fastened a beautiful silver brooch on her shoulder before Sally was buried. I could not leave her to the earth without some ornamentation that would show future archaeologists that this woman had value to her community.

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I’m writing a story solely through objects. It’s subjective. Like waltzing into a stranger’s house, determining who they are by what’s in their living room. Things are clues.

What strikes me most is that art is everywhere in the dollhouse. God knows she dragged us to museums. But I think it might have to do with teaching. Just then she had started going into schools as a volunteer art teacher. She was a “picture lady.” She actually invented that art program with her friend Trish.

The volunteers took reproductions of paintings to classes to help kids learn how to look at art, and get excited by it. Midnight Ride of Paul Revere was always the children’s favorite. That’s why it’s in the house. She’s referencing her own work when she founded that program. I’m wondering if, in her early forties, in the midst of feminism, she ever thought about a new career. Maybe becoming a teacher. Sally must have thought about another, alternate life, we all do. The blue prints say she might have wanted to be an architect. I’d like to imagine the dollhouse was a trial run building before she went back to school, an idea that was quashed, somehow.

Almost all the accessories she bought are in the dining room and kitchen. The service pieces are pewter, which she was into at the time. The kitchen is stocked with many little cans of food, cakes, pies, copper pots and pans. She was cooking a ton back then, for a family of six. She gave a lot of parties. The kitchen is the smallest room in the house, the most claustrophobic.

That’s small potatoes to what I can make of the dining room.

There has only, ever, been a single chair.

Table for one, please. An oasis away from her children and husband. I like that interpretation. I like thinking of her in the middle of her life, late at night, gazing at that single chair and dreaming of other lives and other worlds. Or maybe it’s happenstance…she was just buying things one at a time and never got round to the next chair. This is the problem with interpretation; there’s always another one equally valid.

A consistent theme of my mother’s life was her love for her country. Sally had flags and George Washingtons and Abes and Americana folk art all over. There’s a quilt in the dollhouse that mirrors what she was doing at the time in real life. In Sally’s stylized paintings of the 1970s, quilt motifs appeared, often tied to imagery of Native Americans. She was thinking about their interactions, the settlers and those they displaced.

She loved her country, yes, but my mother always rooted for “the Indians” in the movies over the U.S. cavalry. I do love that.

Did she buy the quilt for the dollhouse first? Or add the quilt after the paintings emerged? She collected old linens until the end of her life and the nexus interests me. Another bit of real life is there are no window treatments in the dollhouse. She pretty much hated curtains. If she went into a room with shutters, she’d race to open them. She loved light. All artists do.

A pastel I made of my mother for the house. I copied this idea from Winterthur’s dollhouse which has a portrait inside of its maker.

I’m just about finished with the house. What’s taking longer is extracting the meaning of why I’ve been doing this project. After the last entry you can see I’m trying.

• Landscape front
• Paint front siding and repaint porch
• Finish printables
• Make historic plaque
• Finish painting animals (various types, all have meaning)
• Hang the lights

I had another idea for the dollhouse. A fogged up bathroom mirror with finger writing on it. I already have some spray paint that looks like frost. I’d spray over a stencil of words. But what would it say? Maybe just a heart.

Even the most humble items we own acquire a history, just from our act of having it.  If it’s old, we add our life to its existing history. From us, where will it go? Objects are passed hand to hand, travel great distances, take dings, are bought and sold and stolen. Everything we bring together in our houses will eventually come apart. It’s entropy.

Everything in the dollhouse that was there in my childhood I can tell you something about. Nobody will ever care and that’s okay. Colleen Moore could tell you everything about her tiny things but it doesn’t affect your enjoyment of her castle. You don’t need the history to appreciate it at all.

Still, she had her memories and when she went, so did they. When you think about things and their afterlife, as I am, you can’t help thinking about death. Of people. Also of things. If you toss an old stuffed animal in the trash because it is too old to be used, it dies its own death – it tumbles into a landfill and falls out of memory.

The dollhouse is always bringing me back to my past. Like a lot of families, it’s complicated. In the last ten years, death has been ever present. I’ve lost two parents, eight pets and several friends. All those loves leave a hole. The dollhouse and its furnishings makes me contemplate death. I guess because it’s aging as fast as I am. Time floods through my fingers. We all know where this is headed. If I save the dollhouse now, who will do it in a hundred years? Maybe I’ve avoided confronting these losses in life and by working on the dollhouse, I distract myself. In essence, it’s playing pretend in a dollhouse to avoid my real life.

The dead don’t literally haunt us but they linger in the mind, which is, I suppose, what a haunting really is.

Things haunt me, too. One is the fate of Sally’s Regency trumeau mirror. When we sold my parents’ house, we debated whether to send the mirror and table to auction. I knew they’d be split up and I knew Mom would not want that. She’d even said, never sell these, don’t break them up! They’ve been together for hundreds of years! But none of us had room for these pieces. The new owners even offered to buy them.

I pushed back because Mom had convinced me they were valuable. I believed in her knowledge. So they went to auction and went for nothing and now they’re separated and I feel awful, almost a horror at what I did. The pieces should have stayed in that house, just a little while longer. The mirror for the dollhouse is my penance. It lives again, if only in my dreams.

My copy at left for the dollhouse dining room.

I always liked that movie The Others where ghosts are wafting through rooms and don’t know they’re ghosts.

I’ve been so focused on my mom, I hadn’t stopped to think what I’d left behind. The traces of my sister and me, our overlay. Did we choose any of that furniture, and don’t remember – like in Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood? We must have been given many of these pieces for birthdays, Christmas.

Our traces are visible here and there. We were a bit destructive, painting furniture hideous colors, marking up accessories – like the old metal tray I repurposed that was covered in pink crayon. A grid drawn in shaky child hand on a grandfather clock. Things often broke – like the wood throne now up in the attic.

So many of the pieces have bits of food in ancient crumbs, and dirt and surely tons of DNA. Here and there are the tiny tan dots of cigarette smoke floating through air.

I found two very old pennies in the dollhouse. 1956 and 1966. We have a family tradition that the dead send us pennies. How in the world had they not fallen out in the move? How had they lasted all those years? Maybe Mom hid them for us to find one day.

Mysteries.

I’ve been constructing an elaborate cage of layered references. Why? I suppose it’s like cave paintings of hands. Just to say, “I was here.”

I’ve become fascinated with time, specifically how time operates within the dollhouse. It’s getting very meta and complicated.

The house is a Mobius strip, a wormhole, a Shrodinger’s box with me, Mom and my sister inside. All at once, it contains all the ages we’ve ever been when we played with it, looked at it, built it, or ignored it. Let’s call it a vessel.

Is the kitty alive or dead if I lift the lid? Is Mom present in this work, still? Does superimposing my adult perceptions onto this inanimate object change the past because I’ve turned the dollhouse into my version of Rosebud? Do objects have fates? Was the dollhouse’s purpose timed to go off in forty years, waiting to reveal a secret story of my mother when I was finally old enough to understand? Is making it symbolic all in my head or the final work of grieving my mother? Is this literally some crazy sort of time travel via objects, that by touching a thing that she last touched is it like Michelangelo’s fingertip and we’re meeting in some other dimension? Well, no. But it’s fun to think about.

See, what you need is a dollhouse in your life.

Where it all began. My toddler dollhouse furniture.