Genius at Work

Sometimes you happen upon a place that makes your knees weak. You forget to breathe. Your pulse speeds up. Time stops. For some of us, it’s the Grand Canyon, or the twilight streets of Rome, or the cloud-swept view from 30,000 feet, or the ancient stones on the lonely Irish highlands.

But if you’re lucky, one day you stumble upon a place that mirrors the quirky interior of your own particular rag and bone shop of the heart. This happened to me last Sunday just outside a small town in upstate New York when my sisters and brother-in-law and I found the Hen House.

A crooked, makeshift trellis led into an overgrown garden scattered with rusty pots, Parisian park chairs with missing slats, little elfin houses hidden under silk flowers and thistles and Queen Anne’s Lace, iron trays and arched headboards, dog dishes and twisted wire planters and peeling window frames…everything etched with the traces of snow and rain and sun and neglect and time, lots of time.

Like Hansel and Gretel entering the forest, enchanted and spellbound, we called, “Hello. Hello!” No one answered except the buzzing flies and the hot afternoon breeze. There was no visible sign of commerce, no cash register, no counter, no desk, just a clutter of envelopes scratched with sums, just tumble, jumble, hittery-skittery piles of the most wildly romantic stuff rising to the rafters of the once-upon-a-time barn.

I don’t know why seemingly random heaps of tarnished silver, musty lace, dolls in bird cages, plaster busts, the insides of moribund clocks, wavery mirrors, Venetian chandeliers, tureens, candlesticks, yellowed paper, Victorian sewing machines, sooty lamps, and faded velvet opera capes can transport my heart to swoony places, but they do and in the Hen House, they surely did. I was quite sure there was a genius at work here. Only a madly deliberate intelligence could have created such glorious cacophonies and scatterings of oddities.

The juxtaposition of things was so unusual, so serendipitous, I thought about Miss Havisham and how she would have felt right at home here. I thought that perhaps I had been transported to a dusty backstreet shop in a sleepy corner of Paris. I thought how do you ever find magic like this in such a seen-better-days town.

Places like the Hen House stay with us. They charm our world-weary eyes. They color our pale imaginations rouge and saffron and lapis. They nourish our spirits hungry for evidence of an original talent at work. And they remind us again and again of what is possible in this impossible world.

If it were possible, I would visit every week and pick one corner, one tabletop, one towering clutter of what-not and stare and stare until I was filled to the brim, ready to go out and make a little wild magic of my own.