House series #6 – The Awesome Railing

    Christopher was right when he said the stairs would dominate the house. The first thing you see when you walk into the house is the stairs or, more accurately, their railing. 

 You probably gasp. You walk into the room as under a spell, your eyes on the railing. The railing is the artistic center, the eye-catching wonder, the totally awesome focal point of my house.

    It was my son who made the railing. He is a welder and a designer and has built railings for high-end houses owned by wealthy people with an eye for art. I am not wealthy, but I have an Ela Lamblin railing in my house. I am so lucky.
    One handicap, it would seem, was that Ela lives in Washington. He would have to build the nine panels of the railing there and bring them here to install them. I would have to take very careful measurements to make sure they would fit. I did the best I could and hoped I had measured accurately. We talked on the phone about designs. We emailed ideas back and forth. Ela suggested a nature theme. He sent me sketches.

I didn’t know how he was going to transfer those lines into steel, but I was captivated by the abstract depictions of elements I love: water, mountains, rain. I trusted he would know how to turn idea into fact.
    In mid-August Ela drove to the Applegate with a van full of steel panels and his welding equipment. He arrived at my house one morning, unloaded his welder, set it up in my yard, pulled the panels from the van, and went to work.

    He gave me the job of scrubbing the welds of each panel with a wire brush. Richard, my builder, came to help with the installation. He and Ela measured, hauled panels into place, drilled, and screwed. Incredibly, everything fit, almost to a T. (I love the small, indistinct discrepancy, of less than an inch on only one panel, to prove the difficulty of the task.)     

    One by one, the panels went up. By the end of the day, everything was finished. Ela gave me a hug, loaded his welder into the van, and drove back to Washington.
    Now I have the most beautiful railing imaginable. Circles and spirals and whirly lines – a dozen ways to depict rain and clouds, trees and water, snow on mountains. Each panel evokes a different image: mountains and atmospheric swirls with a few colored glass balls suspended among them (later additions); drops of water making concentric circles in a pond; parallel lines of wind-blown rain from semi-circular clouds; swirls of clouds with bubbles of rain; a gorgeous tree with colored glass-bottle-bottom fruits; two sunbursts (or clouds or snow or atmospheric movements) above a little house with the exact silhouette of the house I live in; horizontal wavelets like fish or creek-bed currents or leaves flowing downstream (or –?); two mountain peaks, streaked with snow, beamed on by a sun (or is it the moon?) with rays of more glass bottle bottoms; a sun’s long rays streaming onto mountain peaks far below; and – is this my favorite? – long lines of steel, each ending in a rounded raindrop, raining between sharp mountain peaks below and fluffy curves of clouds above. No, the tree is my favorite. No, it’s the house. No, pond. No, I can’t tell. One day it’s one, one day another.
    I am so lucky to have this beautiful piece of art as the centerpiece of my house. I am so lucky to have a son both so generous and so talented. Every day I wake up full of gratitude.