I’ve always liked displaying things on my shelves. From the funniest of trinkets to the family heirloom, I love the “cabinet de curiosités” feel it gives to any place. But nowhere in my house is it truer than on the black Billy bookcases (you know the ones) lining part of my living room. And today I’ll introduce you to two of these objects.
The first, the more recent one of the two, is a moon-shaped lamp. I’m one of those people who grew up with a globe light, one with the map of the Earth on the surface. I adored that thing and I still wonder what might have happened to it. I cannot figure out for the life of me when or why it went missing. But… as much as I love the Earth, I also always had a soft spot for our natural satellite and when I discovered you could now buy moon lamps, I had to have one.
When it arrived, my husband took one good look at the cable and said, “Hum I suppose you’ll want to hide that…” And yes, yes, I did. So, I had to choose where it would be forever because tucking away the wire meant drilling the back of the bookcase and we were not about to do that everywhere.
Now, it occupies the whole shelf by itself, a perfect gray globe imprinted with the surface of the moon, soft muted color against the dark tone of the furniture housing it, on its minimalistic stand of clear wood. Turned off during the day, I only light it up when the sun has completely disappeared below the horizon and I bask in its gentle glow, reading in a chair I wrestle the cats for on a regular basis. It made me love the night a little more.
The other, a bookrack away, is my grandmother’s harmonica. I put it in front of my Stephen King collection, the one my grandfather gave me, so, even thousands of kilometers away from their home, they’re still together in a way. It’s a massive object, far from the kid’s plastic version they were selling in the ’90s, carefully placed in its box, silver against cream in a red casing. And no, I’ve never played it… I tried to blow some air into it once, when my mom brought it to me from France, disregarding her warnings and took a lungful of dust after it stayed in the drawers of the family house for so long, unmaintained. There are a couple of things you shouldn’t do when you are asthmatic. Breathing dirt is somewhere around the top of the list.
It wasn’t always so grimy. The first time I saw it, my grandma exhumed it from the depths of the dress, looking at it with reverence. “Would you like to hear it, kids?” she asked my cousin and I. And of course, of course, we did. I didn’t know back then she could play blues. But now, I remember it every time my eyes fall on it and the soft light of the moon lamp awakes the silver surface of the instrument.
one truth & one lie by Alizé Gabaude is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
Alizé Gabaude 