Let there be lights

There's just something about a porch light that says you're home.  

These are my porch lights, and this is my home.

They got all of the lights installed a few weeks ago, and it's amazing how much different proper lights make in the homeyness of a room.

We got all LED lights for our can lights, and we were a little nervous they'd have that industrial, fluorescent quality.  They totally don't, in my opinion.  I'll have to keep you posted about whether the cost of the LEDs is worth it, but all of the Internet reviews make it sound like they'll last until the kids are in college.

As always, there's one light fixture I particularly want to show you.  I saw it in a magazine about three years ago, decided it would go in my dining room, and never wavered from that decision.

Not when the super-nice guy at the light store told me it was too big for my dining room.

And not even after looking at roughly forty zillion crystal chandeliers in various sizes, shapes, and price ranges.  And who can resist a crystal chandelier?

Evidently, I can.  I don't think this chandelier is for everyone, but the day it went it I spent about an hour laying in the floor gazing at it and taking lots of pictures.  I think it's perfect for my family and perfect for this house.

 

So my awesome chandelier is made of blue bottles.  They're supposed to be "vintage," but I'm not sure I believe that they are.  No matter.  I do think they're pretty.  They're hung on some artfully rusty chains and metal that I also think is pretty.   I like to think of them as my own indoor bottletree.  

Here we go again!  I don't think I'm crazy superstitious, or anything, but I like stories.  I think the stories we tell about ourselves make us who we are, and as a nomad growing up, I kind of adopted stories I liked to give myself a background I didn't really feel like I had.  A lot of what I like about Southern culture is the way it shamelessly appropriates bits and pieces from "mother" cultures and spins them into a new thing.  The South takes the refugees from every diaspora, welcomes them, and makes them at home.

So bottletrees are one of those things that are folk art now because people think they look cool (and they do!), but I guess they've been around forever in people's yards.  They're another protection story; the Internet says that in Africa, centuries ago, people believed that an empty bottle hung outside the home would capture roving evil spirits (like a genie) and keep the home's occupants safe from harm.  So when people were brought here as slaves, they preserved their own culture as best as they could and started putting bottles on trees here to protect their homes.  You'll see them all kinds of places, (like my favorite college-town bakery, where I first learned about bottletrees), but the story is the same everywhere: put up a bottletree in your yard, and the evil things or haints that drift by in the night will get trapped in the bottles and will be burnt up by the rising sun.  I know, people were totally obsessed with keeping the haints away. No one really knows why it became widespread; the Internet also links the practice to witch balls as a Northern European tradition, evil eye amulets near around the Mediterranean, and even the Native American story of the dreamcatcher, so there's somethings about blue and glass and circles that speak to people everywhere of protection. 

This is what I love; the idea is universal; no matter the culture.  There are bad things in the world.  As my favorite, favorite writer (Stephen King!) puts it, "The world had teeth and it could bite you with them any time it wanted."  I think slaves in antebellum America knew that well, not to be too glib about it.  Fortunately, home is an antidote to the bad things, a guard against the teeth, and pretty things make the antidote stronger.  Especially blue glass things.  Especially shiny, milky blue glass bottles hung in concentric circles in one's dining room, bright against the darkness, yes?