I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –

Emily Dickinson

In my middle years, I mostly lived in a hard-kept house with double-pane windows meant to keep things in. And to keep things out. Things like possibilities that glimmered tauntingly on the horizon. And doors? They were solid, oaken slabs that shut convincingly with no need for weather-stripping. Like most, my middle years were working years during which responsibilities and obligations left little room for possibilities. And in my middle years, my days marched with regularity inside the perimeter of these four walls.

Oh, but the earlier and later years! These years are a fairer House with numerous Windows. And there are superior Doors which, by their very nature, are open more than closed. This is a house that glimmers. This is a house of coming and going, of trying on and moving on. This is a fairer house, indeed.

Last week, I attended an event at my granddaughter’s school in which third graders researched and dressed up like famous figures. As I entered the gymnasium, I looked out upon a sea of possibilities, children who were living the lives of such men as Babe Ruth, Elvis Presley, and Albert Einstein and of such women as Rosa Parks, Indira Gandhi, and Annie Oakley–if only for a day. Gracyn stood along the north wall as Shirley Temple, her blond curls loosed by the April wind of two recesses.

Third grade houses are such fair ones! At 8, becoming the next Shirley Temple or Babe Ruth is not only possible, it is palpable. Just within your reach, a presence so tangible that you can see your life spread out before you, and it is glorious. Never mind that you can’t sing or hit a baseball. These are formalities, details to be swept out with the day’s dust. The doors are open, and you see yourself walking from possibilities into realities.

And if third grade houses are such fair ones, imagine the houses of preschoolers. Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland, admitted that Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. In this photo, Gracyn, as Alice, folds her arms against her chest as if to keep the possibilities from escaping. Her costume is merely the outside trapping of a heart whose windows and doors are magnificently flung open to impossible things of all shapes and sizes.

French poet and essayist Charles Baudelaire writes that Imagination is the queen of truth, and possibility is one of the regions of truth. She is positively akin to infinity. There is something akin to infinity when one lives in a fairer house. For seasons of my life, I remember how, in those minutes before sleep, I shaped and reshaped possibilities, creating stories into which I took on heroic roles of rescuing, creating, and inspiring.  And when I tired of one story, I tried on another and then another and yet another. From this springboard of infinite possibilities, I dove into magnificent dreams each night.

In my later years, I have found myself loosening the strictures of my formerly hard-kept house. As I wake many mornings–with the sun and not an alarm clock–it takes a few moments to realize that a bell will not ring every 45 minutes, that I won’t have to wolf down a meager lunch in 19 minutes, that I won’t have to plan bathroom breaks, and that I won’t haul a laundry basket of student essays home for grading. But when I do, a day of possibilities stretches out before me. I could take a walk along the old highway and stop to pet the horses in the small pasture off the south side of the road. I could read anything I want and for as long as I want. I could call my mom on the phone in the middle of the day. I could start a home project and finish it. Or not. I could wander the mall in search of something or nothing. English novelist, George Eliot, claims that the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities. Oh the handsome, dubious eggs called possibilities of these years! I may not have been able to imagine them in my middle years, but they are real nonetheless.

Poet Wendell Berry writes:

A man cannot despair if he can imagine a better life, and if he can enact something of its possibility. It is only when I am ensnarled in the meaningless ordeals and the ordeals of meaninglessness, of which our public and political life is now so productive, that I lose the awareness of something better, and feel the despair of having come to the dead end of possibility.

I am painfully aware that despair growls at the door of even the fairest houses. It comes in the shape of chlorine gas and fatherless children. It peers in the windows with sharp eyes of hunger. And we are tempted to pull our blackout curtains tightly to protect ourselves from the dead end of possibility. 

Still, there continue to be those who go about the business of building fairer houses. They can imagine better lives and see the glimmering possibilities of something better on the horizon. They choose infinity over dead ends, and they press on.

As I helped Gracyn out of her Shirley Temple dress and tucked a loose curl behind her ear, she said, “You know what I want to do when I grow up?” Sing, dance, star in movies like Shirley Temple, I thought? ” I want to start a slime-making company. I think this could really be big, don’t you?” From Shirley to slime in a single day. Such a fair, fair house of possibilities!