Possibility
It may not be the fashion of little girls today, but like a lot of little girls of my generation, my sister and I liked to play house and we preferred to play it outdoors. For us this was usually in the vacant corner lot two doors down from our house. The slightly mysterious man who owned it, lived in the house adjacent to it and had rather purposefully left it both wild but yet groomed - the weeds mowed but the surface not graded. There amid hollows and mounds was a fat willow tree with low-leaning perfect climbing branches - our imaginary houses were usually of the Swiss Family Robinson variety - have our kitchen on the northeast limb and the sitting room on the lowest limb and the bedroom on the widest where we could pretend to be comfortable lying on it. Also on that lot, were huge bushes with arching stems that created enormous hollow spaces underneath so that we had sort of living wickiups we could crawl under and prepare our imaginary and succulent leaf, mud and acorn meals.
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Later as an adult I was always drawn similarly to houses that were in that stage of construction where the roof was on but the studs were open and uncovered. Like a house of glass walls -- you can see clear through to the other side of the house. The outdoors and the indoors are mingled - like in our tree or leafy wickiup. You walk from space to space speculating on the it’s future function. I always kind of hate to see the walls covered. I like being able to see all the rooms at once - every thing is so open, so capacious, so flexible.
Of course at some point, all those real-world issues of privacy, modesty, comfort and security lobby for decisions that necessarily close off options but I especially like that place, poised just before you have to make those decisions.
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Our assignment in New Orleans was to gut a 10-room, 2-bath, 100 year-old duplex with 12 foot ceilings called in New Orleans a double “shotgun” house.
So what’s a shotgun house? . . . the definition is a narrow rectangular residence, 12-14 feet wide, with doors at each end. Although found throughout the south, the style originated in New Orleans. There it’s really the only possible configuration for the long narrow lots. Almost all of the lots we saw, especially in older parts of the city are long and narrow -- a response to the historic scarcity of dry land on that swampy terrain. As a bonus, the configuration also makes for good airflow in a hot climate - something we noticed thankfully whenever a breeze blew came up.
The term “shotgun house,” supposedly comes from the saying that one could fire a shotgun through the front door and the pellets would fly cleanly through the house and out the back door. Aside from wondering why you would want to DO that, it wouldn’t have worked anyway in our house, since the doors alternated, middle, right, left, right,left. I discovered after a little on-line research there’s a good probability the name’s origin is a corruption of the African term ‘to-gun’ which means “place of assembly” in a certain region of Africa.
Each side of our duplex shared a common wall and 4 chimneys. On each half, five squarish rooms were strung one behind the other with a narrow hallway and bath between rooms 2 and 3. The last room, room 5, was the kitchen, probably to keep the heat as far away from the rest of the house as possible. Room 4, just before the kitchen, was a little wider and lighter, having a 3 sided baywindow-like projection with windows and a windowed door on one facet. My husband made the remark that the only place in the house, other than the front room, where you could get a view of the street, was from that angled side door. Somehow, his mentioning that made me realize that a guest probably came in the front door to the parlor, or front room, but the owners probably came in that side door, so you didn’t really have to go through all the bedrooms to get to the back of the house which had seemed like such a drawback at first.
We never met the owners of our house, an ailing elderly couple. Their daughter was doing the leg and paperwork of repair and restoration for them and had asked that we try to keep the 100-year-old woodwork intact. On the left-hand home there was an 7-ft tall double sliding door between room 1 & 2. On the right-hand house, there was a french door in the parallel spot with sidelights and small glass-doored cabinets at the base on each side. Keeping the 8 inch baseboard molding intact meant we spent a lot of time scooping out plaster, lath and nails that had accumulated behind it. While keeping the woodwork might have made it a little more work for us, I could see why she wanted to do it. They were battered but still nice touches of character and history.
When we had finished stripping the walls to the studs, I was struck by how beautiful our house was. All open inside, you could see up to the crawl space and the underside of the roof that probably hadn’t been opened in 100 years; you could see through to the duplex on the other side; like a movieland ghost you could walk magically through the walls to the other side between the studs -- passing from one house to the other. You could see to the kitchen from the parlor - you could see backwards from the kitchen, through the old french door with the side lights out the open front door. Transitioning between the other rooms were those old wide white door frames we’d saved with their high glassed transoms. You immediately began imagining how it might look someday. Your eyes were opened, you could now see that it would be a beautiful home.
Somehow when we stripped our house down to its bones, it was no longer about decay and loss, but now it was about possibility.
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I like possibility...it’s a great place to be...possibility is. Possibility is where imagination lives.
Now that I’ve seen it I want the all of New Orleans to get to the place where it’s no longer about loss and decay, I want it to get to that place of possibility.
Excerpting from Romans 9:23-24
“Everything is possible for him who believes.”
“I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!”
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And the people said: “Hallelujah”
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