Inspiration

Dixie Divas

Those who know me well will tell you that when it comes to decorating, I have a scant amount of natural talent.

In college, I briefly minored in interior design but when the professor repeatedly called on me to explain my ridiculous floor plans so that the class could be entertained to laughter beyond tears, I got the message. This is how I came to minor in English and discovered that I matched up much better with Eudora Welty than Frank Lloyd Wright.

This I have learned though: Entire rooms can be built around one something – small or large – that is known in the design world as an “inspiration” piece. In my kitchen, all of the design grew from one brightly colored small rooster that had been given to me as a gift by the Mississippi Poultry Federation when I spoke at their convention.

“I love this rooster,” I announced to Mr. I-Don’t-Do-Cute-Rudy who helps to guide my decorating along. “It has all the colors in it that I want in my kitchen.”

One day I knocked the rooster over and Rudy flew across the room to retrieve it. “Don’t break the inspiration!” he screeched.

“Can I have this old lamp?” I asked Mama one day, holding up one that had long lost its shade after residing in our house for decades. It is quaintly pretty with a tall, narrow top and a bulbous bottom that is hand-painted with a bouquet of pink roses and trimmed out in faded gold. It is French enough and vintage enough that I thought it would work well in a guest room.

When Kim, my faithful, fabulous girlfriend who creates all the custom window and bedding treatments for my home, saw it, she exclaimed, “This is wonderful! This will be our inspiration piece. We’ll select fabrics and build the entire bedroom around it.”

Turned out, though, that lamp has a story. One I never knew.

“That’s the first lamp we ever owned,” Mama said when she gave it to me. “We’d been married 10 years before we had ever a lamp.”

My eyes widened incredulously. “You’re kiddin’ me.” I couldn’t imagine such.

She shook her head. “Your daddy was the pastor of this tiny little church up in the mountains. We were at the Christmas program and I saw one of the deacons walk in, toting that lamp with a bow on it. I thought to myself, ‘Oh, what I’d give to have a lamp like that.’ When they took the gifts off the Christmas tree, they brought us that lamp. The church people had chipped in and bought it for us. I’ve never been so proud of anything in my life as I was of that lamp. It tickled me to death.”

I fell deeply in love with that lamp when I heard Mama’s story. Now, when I look at it, I don’t see its beauty. I see its reminder.

I like to remember from where I come. I am a product of plain, tough-minded Southerners who led hard-scrabble lives including grandparents who futilely fought the rocky red clay to bring forth a meager farmer’s living and like-minded parents who escaped separate mountain poverty to build better lives for themselves and, eventually, their children and grandchildren.

That lamp represents to me, not only from where I’ve come, but also where it is possible to go. When I turn that lamp on, I also turn on one of life’s ancient truths: Any past can be a great starting point for a wonderful future.

Funny, but I found a whole lot more inspiration in that piece than I was expecting.

Turns out that entire lives, not just rooms, can be built around an inspiration piece.