Gone to the Beltane Fires

On Curation, Rebellion, and Authenticity

My family had a beautiful quarter-sawn oak coffee table. Through my entire childhood, it was the tidiest part of our chaotic house — even with nine children, somehow that table always looked perfect.

When I was 17, my mother sat me down and explained how the world worked: Your coffee table is the most important thing in your house. What’s on it tells people who you are. It needs to have these things: A copy of the Christian Science Monitor. A book that says you’re liberal. A book of good literature — with a bookmark in it, to show you’re actually reading it. At least one New Yorker magazine. A book about mythology, to show you understand history. A vase of flowers, to show you’re well-rounded. It’s the only way people know who you are.

This was how I was trained into a curated life — one that didn’t depend on conversation, argument, or conflict. One that smuggled in authenticity rather than lived it outright.

Of course, I rebelled against it. I thought it was about pretense rather than directness and honesty. Most of my life I’ve struggled to show who I am directly and honestly. The gap between how I feel — careful, held in — and how my life actually looks — wildly unconventional and colorful — has never stopped surprising me.

My house now is painted in primary colors. The décor is over the top, full of color and art and quirkiness. It has to be that way because subtlety doesn’t catch my eye. If it’s not bold, I can’t actually see it.

What serves as a coffee table in my home now is an ottoman covered in a quilt I made — Home on the Range, based on Freddy Moran’s work — depicting sexy cowgirls and women cooking at their kitchen ranges. My mother would have had something to say about mixing wild patchwork with a spotted ottoman.

My mother died when I was 38, and the coffee table came to me. I laughed, uncomfortably, that this was my inheritance.

I hauled it across the country and put it straight into the barn attic, because it represented something I wasn’t ready to have in my living room. It stayed there for years.

One afternoon I found myself describing the table to a friend — the quarter-sawn oak, the way it never seemed to accumulate the mess the rest of the house did — and I heard something unexpected in my own voice. Tenderness. I had spent so long reacting against what the table represented that I had nearly missed what it actually was: my mother’s attempt, however misguided it felt to me, to be known.

When the anger and rebellion finally quieted, I understood something I hadn’t let myself see before: that I had always yearned for the same thing. To be seen, known, and understood by my large chaotic family. My harsh reaction to the coffee table wasn’t really about the coffee table at all — it was about that unfulfilled yearning, and the pain of recognizing it in someone I had spent years reacting against. My mother and I had wanted the same thing. We just had very different ideas about how to get it.

So, I went looking in the barn for the coffee table. It was, after all, a family heirloom — and a beautiful piece of furniture.

It was gone. Nowhere to be found.

I like to imagine that the fairies had carted it off to the Beltane fires —the bonfires that the Celts lit on May 1 to celebrate the return of summer, inviting in protection, purification, and fertility. A fitting end for an object that had held so much longing.

Here’s the thing: My mother wasn’t wrong. People do know us by our surroundings, and our lives are curated whether we mean them to be or not. She might be disapproving by my over-the-top home — but she wouldn’t be wrong that it is part of how people know who I am. Part of how I am reminded of who I am at the heart of me. The only thing that’s changed is who’s doing the curating.

Irony is a strong teacher.