cracking the lid on the diorama

Judging from how many images Google served up this morning, plenty of kids still make dioramas for school.  This is a great thing, at least in my opinion. Dioramas were among my favorite school projects, something which I think so speaks to the kid-mind, that making of a miniature world inside a shoe box.  It's small enough to be manageable, unlike the real world, and you get to control each element that winds up inside it.

I remember it being profoundly satisfying, also somewhat frustrating especially since all of us in my childhood home coveted shoe boxes and cigar boxes, any cute small container, so it was always hard to find the raw material required.  Getting the little world just so was always super-challenging, a place I often felt I had fallen short.

I remember one diorama in particular that my father helped me make in the fourth grade.  It functioned like a tv, sort of, with drawings on a roll of paper and knobs you could turn to advance the storyline. Super fun.

Diorama, miniature little world, tiny stuff, all that is just fine by me.

A friend -- yes, a grown-up -- recently purchased a doll house and is furnishing it with tiny things, room by room, deriving delicious satisfaction from the placement of each tiny plate or cat or butler.  I highly encourage clicking through and checking out what she's making.  It's gorgeous.  Yes, it's eccentric probably in women our age, but it's also just lovely, so pretty. And she writes so well about the why of it.  There's something entrancing about the tiny and also something so peaceful about creating a whole environment that can stand for all of the things you wish your larger environment to include, to be about.  Let other people vision board or scrapbook or whatever -- no one gives them shit about that (ok, maybe I do).  This exercise of the tiny home is just as serious an exploration of what we love and want, just as valid a way to express ourselves creatively.

Nada Gordon, ululate.blogspot.com

What's funny for me right now as I reread my little delighted song of the tiny, of the diorama, is where this thought originated this morning and where it traveled.  I started out by describing my sister Carla's apartment to my mother in an email as a shoebox with the lid on tight, from there my mind went to diorama, then to Nada's dollhouse.  

The thing about the shoebox with the lid on tight is not a happy thing.  It's not happy like diorama or dollhouse.  So like the Pollyana I truly am, I started someplace negative and found my way to something brighter, that makes me happy.  But going back to the beginning, it's really true that everytime I've visited with my sister, I've felt like I was inside a dark diorama, the lid on the box, that I'm inside, essentially, their contraction.  I generally love being in people's homes, especially those times when I feel like I'm walking around inside that person's vision.  It can be profoundly like being inside someone else, inside what makes them tick, in their skin.  I love that!  Homemaking, like dollhouse-making, can be profoundly expressive.  

But I don't feel that at my sister's place.  I am just aware all the time of the temporariness of the arrangement, even the couch doesn't seem committed. I want to see flowers, I want to hear music, I want to see friends, other people coming to call, coming to bring casseroles and cookies, to drop off lasagna.  Other people, i.e., not blood relations.  Friends.

That dark shoebox for me is a place without friends. It makes me want to peel the lid off the box, let some light in, some laughter from unrelated voices.  

As I've written before, I don't know shit about what it is to be them, to live their life, to get by on what they get by on.  I only see what they let me.  But I do know this: that their diorama would be more beautiful if only the lid came off it, if they let people in to see it, to help them, to keep them company at their miniature little coffee table in their tiny living room.  With the lid off, everything will right away seem brighter, their little diorama will be prettier with the light that friends bring with them.

Sure, it'll still be tiny.  But I love tiny, as do lots of other people.  That's not a deal-breaker.  Just leave the lid off.  Let people in.