A Brown Frame

I don’t know about you, but repairing and rearranging things at home is almost a meditation for me. There is some sort of peace in the repetition of living the same space. Unimportant details that provide joy in small doses, for many years to come.

I remember that day, perhaps an afternoon, when there is nothing better to be done. I am looking at this huge brown frame in my living room. This brown frame had existed as long as the apartment. When I first moved in, I wanted a huge frame to contain all my travel photos, but having a professionally made frame was way too expensive. Besides, it did not necessarily need to function as a frame, and it would not be needed to move anywhere. It was intended more as decoration. So my mum and I decided to make one – we bought some cheap wood from the local hardware store, cut it down into pieces, and stained them brown, the way I imagined an expensive-looking frame would be like.

Seven years have passed and the photos are getting stale. They curled up at the corners, randomly scattered on the wall, collecting tons of dust, representing a naïve aesthetic that I had back then. I took all the photos down a week ago – out of the frustration to start this wall again. But somehow, the empty frame stayed.

And this afternoon, as my gaze lingers on the wall, the urge to fill this frame occurs. It sounds funny to say that I miss home when I am at home, but that is how I feel. I start to pull things out of storage boxes, grabbing postcards and pictures off my desk. I feel like a curator, curating important memories and things in life that keep calling back to me. Snow, garden, home… one flows to the other. There are also coffee equipment, jugs and mugs that I have hung up. To display them together feels like saying that daily, operational things are as important as past memories. 

As I’m putting up the new pictures, I can’t help to realize that I’m using them to frame the brown frame. The purpose of the brown frame is changing. It is becoming the content, something more meaningful than the new pictures. Is it because of its age? Does it represent things it used to contain that are no longer there?

It is never my intention to keep the brown frame there, yet it becomes the motivation for my little project this afternoon. I carefully align everything using the frame as a reference. In my mind, it is becoming an anchor. I thought about a “nail household” who refuse to move when urban development project knocks on their door. It is becoming a stubborn obstacles that developers must build around.