Spirals

When I first walked into the house with the spiral staircase, I gasped. Our real estate agent nodded.

“Yes,” he said, “It’s a little much, isn’t it?” He gestured towards the blush pink living room walls where wind chimes hung in the arched window. This was a young man who lived to hunt and fish. His vocabulary didn’t include the words for varying shades of pink, nor the sound of wind chimes caressed by manicured fingers.

Yes, it was much, not a little, but a lot. The kind of much that takes your breath away, like first love or your firstborn. What gob smacked me the most, however, was the spiral staircase beckoning me as I stood in the entryway. The elegant fir banister turned in loops, shiny with anticipation of what lay beyond what could be seen from the ground floor. I stroked the whorls at the end of the banister, turned away from each other like apostrophes pretending to be Janus. Janus was the Roman G-d of beginnings and endings with two faces. One face looked into the future; the other, the past. And here I was in the present falling in love with a house for the first time.

I have always felt the tug of spirals. Walking city streets in their Point A to Point B patterns might speak to the Type A citizenship that’s been foisted upon me, but it is spirals that call to my true nature. Inside my groomed exterior with its straightened white teeth and eyes lined with charcoal lurks a woman who is most comfortable within the curved dark of caves and underneath the flirtatious canopies of maples. Straight lines lead to the grave with their rectangular boxes arranged side-by-side under rectangular beds of dirt. While my husband chatted with the realtor on the driveway, I drank in the irregular, craggy mountaintops over the Canadian border. I envisioned globular clouds against a pearl gray sky floating by as I took morning walks to the lake. A deer appeared on the lawn and wandered by with curved antlers on its head like a menorah, interrupting my reverie about the non-linear nature of reality.

Nature gets it. There aren’t perfectly straight lines in a river or in the waves left in the sand by the outgoing tide or even the moon in all her phases. Spirals are as embedded in the earth as they are in my genes. To think how many years I yearned for hair as straight as a pony’s mane and just as silky. My hair—my life affirming, nature worshipping hair—refused to bow to the will of a flat iron. My scalp sprouted spirals in a joyous, rambunctious proof of life.

Life rolls along in turning spirals, like the seashell I found in the fleshy folds in my infant daughter’s ear, a delicate pink kissed by spirals within spirals without end. Like my love for her. My son sports a smattering of freckles in a random pattern over his nose that from a distance look like a galaxy of swirling stars. My husband fries up local salmon turning the bright red inside to a pink shimmer that might dance across a pearl. I string them all together in a necklace I drape around my throat, the circle of them encircling each other in an invisible spiral.

My husband, a painter, tells me that black isn’t really a color. Tell that to my hair. Sixteen years ago black springs bobbed on my head, then frizzled in the humidity of summer. When I applied the torture of metal and heat to my spirals, they lay down like a resentful dog, one eye on the door for escape when the master headed up the straight staircase to bed. I didn’t look like me anymore, especially when I painted the locks with shoe-polish black to cover who I was becoming: A woman with white hair and a twisty-turny geography on top of my head. I was born in New York, dropped down to Georgia as a child, rolled to California as a young adult and wound up the coast to Washington in middle age. Who knows where my old age will take me. It is never a straight line from the womb to the tomb.

Before seeing the home with the spiral staircase, I remember remarking to our agent that I didn’t want to live in a neighborhood that was crowded like a rabbit warren. I shuddered thinking about how the rabbits’ housing crammed together.
“What’s a rabbit warren?” he asked.

House after house had started out promising. One hid a secret garden with puffs of purple hydrangeas. Another offered a kitchen with a six-burner stove with red knobs. But all fell short on the bedroom level with their perfectly square or rectangular walls.

My curly hair stood on end when our realtor opened the front door to reveal that spiral staircase. He stepped aside for me to enter. The staircase rushed to greet me.
“Yes,” I replied to the agent, the young man who lived to hunt and fish, who didn’t know where rabbits called home. “You are right. It’s a little much.”
We bought this house of spirals—with its rounded rooms and half-moon shaped windows—the same day. Unlike Janus, we never looked back.