miniature histories and a memoir of the dollhouse - The Feminist Wire
►http://thefeministwire.com/2013/08/my-dollhouse-myself-miniature-histories
The flood ruined my family’s possessions we had stored there, our suitcase, our boxes of books, photographs and papers. For a week, my parents stayed up late in the basement every night, throwing away soaked cardboard boxes and piling our ruined possessions into garbage bags. The dollhouse was the only object in our basement on Galvez Street to survive the flood.
The 1978 flood was nothing like the flood that would come later, the flood that would drown New Orleans in August 2005, leaving the whole city underwater. The levees did not break. The river did not crack the floodwalls. Now that I am adult, I can imagine what these days were like for my parents, doing the grim work of mopping and cleaning a basement in a house that did not belong to them, while realizing their own belongings that they thought were safe in boxes and on shelves were destroyed. But at the time all I cared about, with typical childhood selfishness, was my dollhouse.
Nothing could be saved.
Except the dollhouse.
To me, the dollhouse surviving dry and intact was proof of its magic. And of my mother’s magic and her ability to control the world: she’d built me my own house, which I believed would never be destroyed. My mother made me a perfect miniature universe that stayed safe when the rest of the world collapsed.
