dear mom, dad
In this piece I have a few lines from a letter I wrote to my parents in 5th grade in Crayola marker. It was an attempt to help my parents see how we loved them for their differences and to end some of the arguing. The house we were trying to preserve at this point was empty and weak like the one in the photo. The letter was a bandaid to preserve the structural integrity of a whole house. Now Charlie, Quinn and I are from the outside looking in, as a team, after all we’ve been though can see the house for what it really was when before we were blindly trying to save something that was already lost.
Chatter
The image featured in the center of this piece is my childhood home in Castine Maine. My dad bought it when we were living in Brooklyn as a place to escape the chaos of the city in the summer and to be closer to my grandparents in Maine. It came to provide more than just an escape from the city but all chaos that was home life. When we were there life was carefree and disconnected. There was no internet just an old radio in the kitchen and a tv with an assortment of Scooby Doo movies on DvDs. The house is suspended on paper by telephone wires to symbolize how that home was suspended in our minds as a sacred dream like place and will remain there as a picture of what life was like before. When we had to sell the house in 2018 it marked a shift in our lives and the mind of my 5th grade self. Now the house really is just a dream, stagnant like a telephone wire that steadily holds shoes and birds. The image in the forefront is one of 4 year old me kissing my grandmother. When we said goodbye to our Castine home we also said goodbye to a time when my grandmother was the caregiver who taught us how to sew and made buttered plain pasta for every meal.
However sad it felt then and still feels now to have to let go I included the excerpt from my poem to symbolize how what made Castine and the time spent with my grandmother so special was not just the places and the times in my life. They are not lost by having to let go. The people and the memories and the stories are what made these times special. I am so very lucky to have been able to grow up in several homes full of laughter, stories, characters that love and want to share everything with you. Chatter fills this home and for that reason nothing is ever left empty.
Make Believe
Growing up my brothers and I used to always make cardboard homes after we got a package in the mail. We “sold” origami goods and random toys out of them and played house for hours. The make believe store front or house felt safe and secure, a world we built where anything is possible. The family living inside always had a dad and a mom and a kid. We built these houses, these narratives of stereotypical, nuclear families where everything was exactly in its place. In the end the house was just a cardboard box with crayon windows held together by copious amounts of masking tape. In this piece I placed my brothers and I in a cardboard house. What we thought we knew of the perfect family wasn’t sustainable. It could be broken down just as easily as a cardboard house. The make believe days in the cardboard box were full of meaningless household tasks. The excerpt from the poem stands to represent how what feels like the bare minimum, waking up and existing with the people you love, being expressive and genuine, it’s what makes that cardboard house into an unbreakable home.
Brought to the Table
The section of the poem I chose for this piece symbolizes the importance of spending time with the people you love and feel you belong with. Sharing and creating memories with others at the simplest moments like a morning coffee or listening to music cleaning dishes I have learned have made more of an impact on my life than anything else. These relationships that are sustained without anything showy, just by being present and genuine, bring meaning to life. In the piece there are three photos of myself, my brother and my mom; each taken before a change in our lives. On the right the photo was taken before we moved to a new house in Connecticut, the second was taken in CT before we moved to Puerto Rico and the left was taken before I left for college. No matter where we live or how long we've been a part my family and I have always been able to laugh and be weird and the most beautiful memories are spent with them sharing and being present. While the cardboard table and paper setting is fragile and impermanent, the memories made will last lifetimes.