The Atrium of My Dreams

Today, I had some serious ancestral DNA activation taking place between alabaster Knights from the Crusade era and dark wooden choir chairs from the 15th century. Did you know that marble sculptures and Medieval paintings of breastfeeding Madonnas exist? Based on the collection from the Isabella Stewart Gardner estate, you'd think it was the normal position for the blessed Saint and her holy son. I had seen hundreds of paintings of the Virgin with child, but never had I seen her nipples. Not once before today. And we think we're so open-minded in our culture with our prude puritan values and the suppression of feminine power and organic maternal identity.

The giant room with the enormous marble fireplace, whose mantel could easily mount a basket ball hoop for the average 19th century Bostonian, was a time machine for me. The textiles, satin cushioned wood chairs, dark wood lattices, hand-carved apothecary cabinets with keyholes, and candelabras that hold a dozen beeswax flames. In the center of this room was my dinner table, the same length as the one is my house.

Some kids day dream of Christmas, I've always day dreamed of the Norman Invasion, battles between the Anglo Saxons and the Normans, and between the Knights of the Templer and the Vikings. I fantasized of coughing up blood in a drafty castle. The sound of spindles during months of consumption in darkened rooms adjacent to long corridors and a mezzanine. Museums have always made me feel at home with paintings of sickly hemophiliacs with ugly grimaces and frightened heirs and women marred by still births. Those are my people. Seeing those pained expressions, and all of the ornate iron crosses... it's like coming home.



Today it dawned on me, that perhaps somewhere in my genetic makeup lurks a desire for tile floors and second story views of an atrium. My great grandfather was from a Polish noble family. His father owned a vast estate and lived in...you guessed it, a castle-like compound. When his great estate was laid siege to, he defended his land by sword in the ensuing battle. Apparently, it was a huge blow, not only to his appendage, but also to his ego, because he was known as an excellent swordsman. As the story goes, he went from benevolent and gregarious to embittered and temperamental, before gambling much of his fortune away. Galicia, an Austro-Hungarian empire, in what in now Poland, was a very unstable area politically.

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Interestingly, Wikipedia says of Women's Rights in relation to the Norman Invasion:

Women had some rights before the Norman Conquest that were not present in England by circa 1100. The Germanic practice of the Fore-mother was brought by the Anglo-Saxons. Women would begin to lose some rights after the Danish invasion of the early 11th century, in particular, through King Cnut's revision of laws. Women may have lost the right to consent to marriage, for example, widows lost the right to remarry. The Norman Conquest gradually influenced the legal position of women in England. The Norman kings distinguished between aristocrats and commoners, and a woman's place in her life-cycle, in general, brought some changes in opportunities. Widows could remarry (even if they could not always consent to whom they were remarried) and, in general, control property in ways that married women and maidens could not. The greatest rights were generally available to women having access to land.[