This post is a short detour from food to houses, namely one of my favorites, my aunt and uncle’s home in Baltimore, Maryland.
The source of the “File Under ‘I’” column on the blog, my aunt Marilyn is famous for her files, her style, and her kitchen bulletin board.
(The “File under I” story, told here before, goes like this: I was a kid playing croquet with my cousins. We were fighting about the rules. My aunt overheard, and ran into the house.
My mallet froze mid-strike when two minutes later Marilyn came back holding a slim pamphlet.
“Marilyn! you OWN ‘The Rules to Croquet?’ - and you found it that quickly?” I asked, now certain I wouldn’t be allowed to pass backwards through the wicket.
“Of course, it was in my files - filed under ‘I’ for important.”)
There’s not a moment in Marilyn’s house that doesn’t inspire eye and mind, not a surface upon which there isn’t a provocative vignette or a book title you didn’t realize you were dying to read until you saw it in one of many stacks.
Marilyn has her office. Henry has his office. And then there seems to be an entire room dedicated to gardening books.
But the best is Marilyn's bulletin board, the real thing, not Pinterest. I’ve been watching it evolve my whole life. I remember as a child coming downstairs for breakfast, waiting for her to finish cutting melon, and devouring sixty square inches of tactile, dreamy, pithy, silly, quippy, literary, newspaper, magazine, and just other clippings. Marilyn is a clipper; to know her is to receive an envelope of newspaper content spearing the subject of a recent phone call.
A teensy bit over eighty, Marilyn just purchased her first ever computer. First. Ever. But email, facebook, blogs, even Pinterest are no threat to my aunt’s bulletin board. She’s got better taste than most of the world, and thus knows exactly how beautiful are the curled edges of scissored newspaper upon which are printed in two sentences, or an image, something that confirms one of our thousands of selves. We are all an assemblage of our dreams and loves, realized or not. Marilyn knows they are all a little closer posted on cork board.
