The Box Above the Mantle: A Lesson in Foresight
Back in the early 00’s, it was fairly common to see houses built with a nook above the fireplace meant for a TV. The nook had an outlet in the back so you could plug in your TV and not have wires hanging in front of the fireplace, and sometimes it even had special doors like a cabinet, to close off the TV so you didn’t have to look at it. I’m sure residential architects were beside themselves with glee, thinking how wonderful their idea was and how futuristic it was.
Photo circa 2017
The problem was, the nook was deep, but not wide. And it was high (above the fireplace and mantle high). This presented several problems:
The nook was clearly built for a big box TV, but big box TVs were ungodly heavy. How many people did it take to lift that TV above their heads to get it into the nook, plug it in, and set up?
Being above the mantle meant the mantle was essentially useless, because anything you put on it would be in front of the TV.
The doors took up space in the nook when they were open, so the widest big box TV you could fit in the nook was 40”.
Being so high above the floor meant that you were sitting with your neck craned way back to watch a 40” TV.
When we moved into our 2006-built house in 2009, the nook was already outdated and worthless. We moved in with a 55” flat screen TV that we had bought 3 years earlier, and the nook stared at me for 6 whole years before we were able to get a carpenter (thanks Dad) to frame it up and seal it like an Egyptian tomb. (The thought just now occurs to me that I should have put some sort of time capsule in that hole. Missed opportunity.) It taunted me all that time, as I attempted to cover its girth with large artwork. And I cursed the architects and builders who thought that a big hole above the fireplace would be the perfect technological thing to set our suburban home apart in the market.
So long, good riddance.
We didn’t buy our home because of that hole. We bought it in spite of the hole.
But that’s how it is with foresight. The architect wasn’t thinking about the newest technology in TVs when they created our floor plan. Nor did they think that before the house was even built it would be outdated. They didn’t think that things could ever be so different from what they were used to, and they put giant holes in the walls of a whole neighborhood of houses just to prove it.
Next to go, the 1990’s ceiling fan and popcorn ceiling.
Things change, sometimes slowly, and sometimes quickly, but change always comes. Shifting sands in an hourglass, growing toddlers, slowly at first and then suddenly they’re graduating from preschool and going to “big kids’ school.” The daily routine feels the same every day, but it’s shifting, slowly, the wheels turning in your baby’s little body as they stretch and grow, and then before you know it, they’re walking.
I’ve been building a new house for 18 months now, in a different area of Chesterfield, and I’ve been careful not to build any boxes above the mantle, literally or metaphorically. Trying to anticipate what life will look like in ten years is hampered by my inability to see the future, and I’m confined to the limits of my imagination, for better or worse.
What does this have to do with family photography? Other than the obvious “take more photos and get in them” plea that I have for everyone I meet, it’s just a reminder that life changes constantly, sometimes in big bursts and milestones (like weddings and births and preschool graduations), but also in little poofs of dandelion seeds. Small and soft and quiet, changing your landscape while you’re not looking.
Want a couple of tips on how to stay present, even amidst change you can’t see? I wrote about that here.
