I’ve lived in the same house all my life. My parents moved
there a couple months before I was born, and I slept in the same bedroom every
single night until I left for college. There is a lot of good and a lot of bad
accompanied with that house, as there is with life in general. A decorative
negative was the god-awful, moldy, 80’s shag carpet that inhibited our floors
when my family first moved into the house. It was the color of dirty beige and
had shag so deep it covered your ankles. Okay, so that’s a lie but it was
stained all over from the wear and tare of children. When I was about 10 years
old, my parents decided it was time to change the carpet out. I was
surprisingly devastated. I had cried on that crappy shag carpet. I had fought
and laughed and bled my guts out so much that a rug was stapled into the floor
in hopes that no one would accidently see the stain. This carpet was my
childhood and my parents were willing to chuck it out without even noticing
that my brother and I had taken hours to permanently ingrain hot wheel tracks
within it. Much to my joy, however, they replaced the carpet everywhere in the
house BUT the playroom where I spent much of my time. The new carpet was nice.
It was soft and lovely to look at. Pretty soon hard times hit my family and our
new carpet became stained and worn mainly from the secrets it was holding about
the abuse. I grew up, left for college and came home for summer. My mother was
replacing the carpet yet again. I threw a fit. This new carpet was not MY
carpet, as MY carpet was not MY carpet when it was first installed. I quickly
ran to the playroom so that I could lie on the floor and feel the familiar
bumps and stains of the carpet original to the house. It was gone. Mother had
even replaced that room too. My childhood was over. I was never again to be 6
years old crying silent tears because I split apple juice on the carpet, the
carpet and the apple juice stain that no longer had a place in the only house I
called home. My mother sensed my sentimentality and presented me with a shadow
box with three stripes of carpet in it; the 1st strip the original
carpet, the 2nd from when I was 10, and the 3rd a piece
of the new carpet just installed. My mother rolled her eyes remarking my
strange love for the “damn carpet” but it wasn’t the “damn carpet” I cared so
much for. That night I tried sleeping in the brand new double bed that had
replaced the twin I was used to, but couldn’t. I went to lie down on MY carpet,
but it was gone. I stared long and hard at the shadow box and began to sob. I
would never go back to the life I knew with those past carpets. It was over. No
more hot wheels with my brother, no more wrestling matches, no more late night
snacks spilt on the floor, no more yelling, and crying and beatings. I realized
that I didn’t care about the carpet; I cared about the phases of my family that
had stained those pieces of floor covering. The original carpet of my
childhood, aged and worn with cheerio crumbs representing when my family was oh
so young and developing. The carpet from my adolescent and teen years riddled
with tears and blood and true trials of a family. Then the brand new carpet—
beautiful, fresh, and unstained; an opportunity for my family’s future. So
there I was lying on my floor staring at the shadow box full of carpet making
tear stains on the freshly installed soft flooring. Damn new carpet. Mother
will kill me if she sees I’ve already ruined you.
Artist Statement:
I focused on the carpet from my home in Texas. As I came to
write the story I put on some of my favorite music and just really
concentrated. I wanted to get the voice right because it’s just not just an
item we need to do justification to, but to ourselves and the meaning behind
the object. I sat down and just let the story flow out. I didn’t stop or think
I just kept writing and writing wanting to go back and fix any errors or
revisions later. I wanted the story to be as natural as possible but still have
a certain written artistic style that I know I didn’t present when I told it in
front of the class. We were told
to have a certain degree of performance within our text. I struggled with this.
By my final draft of the story I feel like I did accomplish this, but it took a
while to define what I wanted to go for, which was just straight up natural
speak but a fair amount of imagery as well as opening up a little bit about my
family and our relationship struggles throughout the years of growing
together.
The poem from our reading (On page 112) really inspired me
to choose the carpet. It says the lines, “Not only did they touch me, or my
hand touch them: they were so close that they were a part of my being…”. I
really contemplated this while choosing my subject and the carpet stuck out
clearly as something that was more than just an object from my life it was a
part of being that it could have “lived half my life and will die half my
death.”
I am a fan of the classics, so we are gonna kick it old
school and reference The Scarlet Letter.
Just as within the novel, a piece off fabric has so much more symbolism and
metaphorical meaning than it presents. In The
Scarlet Letter it represents Hester’s pain, suffering and societal
judgments on her. She wears her sin, her troubles, and her past. In many ways,
the carpet of my family literally holds all the stains from mishaps and
wrestling matches and fights that mark us as this imperfect family with things
to be judged for. People could look at our carpet and see what we are. That may
be exaggerated to an extreme but I know I would happily cut a piece of the old
carpet and pin it to my clothing if people desired me to represent the sins of
my family in a tangible way. I would wear it proudly to make the point that no
one has a right to judge my family, that they are mine and I am grateful for
the good and the bad choices we have made that have gotten us to where we are,
which is still fundamentally screwed up, but at least still a family. Maybe this carpet, like Hester’s
scarlet letter, is my “passport into regions where other women dared not tread”(Nathaniel
Hawthorne).
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