– Nicole Cooley –
First, the shock and pleasure of scale: film star Colleen Moore sitting in her silver fairy castle at The Museum of Science and Industry. Or a large wax apple resting in a parlor, beside a miniature settee, scarily abject. Reaching into my daughters’ blue and yellow A-frame to set up a bathroom sink, I am conscious of my own largeness, my clumsiness. I am conscious, I am pleased, that that my body is occupying a space where it should not be.
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September 2005 three days after the hurricane: I found my dollhouse furniture in the basement, carefully wrapped in newsprint by my mother, table legs glued and mended, everything repaired.
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I opened the box my mother had packed, the contents of my dollhouse from New Orleans. I told my daughters they could only play with my dollhouse furniture in the basement, with me watching. Arcadia was two. What if an irreplaceable piece broke? What if it were lost? I was the mother and made the rules: allowed and not allowed.
Miniature: 1586 (n.) "a reduced image," from the Italian miniatura "manuscript illumination or small picture," from the Latin miniare "to paint red," from minium "red lead," used in ancient times to make red ink. Extended sense of "small" (adj.) is first attested 1714, because pictures in medieval manuscripts were small, infl. by Latin. min-, root expressing smallness (minor, minimus, minutus, etc.).
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Hold a fingernail-sized cake circled with rosettes in the palm of your hand.
Match with the objects that we have in our own house.
A blender! A sliced watermelon, tiny pink and black triangles! A roll of toilet paper!
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Debris, hodgepodge, jumble, knickknacks, leavings, leftovers.
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In the early years of mothering before that August, in those first years with two daughters, I felt as if I were drowning. This was the metaphor I most often chose when rocking, changing, nursing, holding, comforting, and it was wrong. A flood is not a metaphor, but I couldn’t stop envisioning myself as a basement, filled to its brim, a shaking muddy surface.
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March 1978: my dollhouse was almost swallowed by the flood.
The first flood I remember in New Orleans when I was a child, the one that hardly matters. In the basement of the rented house owned by the man whose grandfather invented a famous New Orleans cocktail was my pink dollhouse, built by my mother.
And when the waters rose, for the first time, for those of us who didn’t live through Camille and Betsy, those of us who knew nothing about real floods, we couldn’t believe that water could fill a basement that was not even underground, that water could swirl up to the four legged coffee table, around a fake stone path made of contact paper that circled the dollhouse, we couldn’t believe water could rise like that but the inside of the house stayed dry.
My mother in the basement for days, trying to save our family’s things, our boxes, suitcases, letters, dishes.
My sister and I in the basement with our safe dry miniature house, arranging and re-arranging.
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A skirted chair. A washstand.
A foil mirror bordered with shells.
Scented soaps—paper wrapped beads.
Red velvet settee with fringed trim.
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That August, sitting between my daughters on the floor, I showed my girls the tiny objects I loved. The pink glass perfume bottle and mirror set, the basket full of French bread, the chaise lounge, the trestle bed. All afternoon, we sat together in that other basement—the one where I was the mother-- setting up furniture in imaginary rooms on the floor. The pink house from New Orleans was gone.
I was the mother. I was the daughter. First the shock and pleasure.
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Miscellany, mishmash, mixed bag, motley, mélange, notions, novelties.
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The first dollhouses in Europe, built in cabinets in the seventeenth century, were not intended for children. Their importance was their accuracy of scale, and they were to be admired not touched. Eighteenth century England brought the baby house, built to be an exact copy of the owner’s home.
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This was the August I began to save everything small I could find in our house to give to the girls for the dollhouse: beads, sequins, pearls, pebbles, pencil erasers, paper clips, buttons, dried beans, feathers.
Upstairs I filled shoeboxes and cookie tins with the small, the missing, the tiniest objects in the house, which could be used in the dollhouse.
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In secret, at night while I slept upstairs, in the basement, my mother built my dollhouse.
I was in second grade. She and her friend Joan worked together, each making a dollhouse for their daughters. The dollhouse’s blue roof opened on a hinge. Six rooms, a bathroom, gleaming white staircases, and electric lighting run by a battery pack hidden in the house’s side yard.
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Miniature: not reduced but in fact made larger. My childhood dollhouse I wanted to live inside instead of my family home.
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Oddments, particles, patchwork, potpourri, rags, refuse, remainder, remnants.
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That was the August of the second flood. That was the August of the hurricane and the water rising, rising. That was the August all I could think of was my parents in the locked-down, flooded city so I brought the girls to the basement and opened the dollhouse box and took out my treasures, spread them on the cold cement floor.
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A set of blue and white speckled teacups, matched with saucers.
A gold wing chair.
A butter churn.
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The Colleen Moore Dollhouse in the museum or the dollhouse sealed behind glass in the public library children’s room. To be admired, not touched. My girls are not interested, even in looking. Their delight in dollhouse is holding, handling, arranging. We don’t have the pink house but we make our own houses out of boxes and drawers. We carry the furniture upstairs and begin to set up: dollhouse land. .
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A blue roof.
A waterline circling a shotgun house reveals a ruined interior.
A bed a chair a table a refrigerator out on the curb in front of an empty house.
All of it to be repaired, carefully.
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Rubbish, rummage, scraps, sundries—
A mother, a daughter, a daughter become mother, a replica?
Miniature, not reduced but made--