A wrinkle in time

Some mornings when I wake up I look at the painted walls in our bedroom and think about time. When we started working on the house the walls in the bedroom were a uniform yellow. One day when we were chipping away at something on the wall some paint fell off and we discovered that underneath the yellow the walls had been frescoed with an art deco pattern in blue, grey, green, and purple. John and I spent most of our free time for the following few months on ladders using baking spatulas to chip away at the yellow to uncover what was below.

In one small section, a chunk of wall fell away and revealed yet another pattern below the one we were working on, this one with cobalt blue. We think we’ve pieced together that the earlier decoration was probably done in the 1700s, and the art deco one in the 1800s. They were painted because what is now our bedroom, which is on the second floor, would have probably been the living room at the time, as you would never receive guests on the ground floor.

But what interests me most is to imagine the thoughts and conversations of the people who stood right where I am now laying, probably having animated discussions about which pattern to choose, which colors, which painter. The same conversations, concerns, and inspirations of light and proportion of the room that John and I have had, but separated by four centuries. Sometimes I feel like there is a thin gauze separating us, and if I strain hard enough I can see through it to the other side, to those other people and times. And I am reminded all the time that we are very temporary caretakers of this little patch of earth.

There are a couple of spots of even older paint that we stumbled across. When we bought the house everyone believed it was from the 1700s, but when we started restoration it became clear that the core was much older. Our house is a big box, taller than it is wide. The core of it was apparently a three-story defensive tower/home, which underwent a major remodel in the 1700s to add another third to the side and back. (The picture at the top shows how many times windows changed positions on the front of the tower over the years.) As a historian once told me, if you lived outside a walled village you either lived with multiple families in a hovel, or a defensive tower. This older paint dates from when our bathroom wall was part of a tower. And you can go back and back. A very nice farmhouse that is near us down the hill was once a Roman villa. The tiny lane in front of our house was originally an Etruscan road. And that’s just what we vaguely know about.

A lovely friend mailed me a book called Here. In it, the illustrator Richard McGuire has imagined the snatches of life that have occurred in the place that is now a nondescript room, spanning hundreds of thousands of years. It reminds me to occasionally take a deep breath, no matter where I am and how modern it seems, to appreciate what a small speck we really are in a very long chain of events that have happened, and will happen.