[Reposted; The Thinking Housewife, 2022] I ONCE interviewed a widow who lived on a traffic island. I was a newspaper reporter in New Jersey and did a feature story about her.
Her plight was comical and absurd, but also inspiring.
Over the years, commercial development had isolated her modest, Cape Cod-style house. Strip malls had sprung up around her and new lanes were added to the highway. A river of ferocious, non-stop traffic rushed past her house. She refused, however, to abandon the property.
So she lived on a median strip.
Northbound traffic passed her front door and southbound traffic passed her back door.
The interesting thing was that she continued to shower attention on her home, which included a few shade trees and a small garden. It could have been a cottage in the country overlooking hills and meadows for all the affection she expended on it. Geraniums and impatiens grew in the garden. Homemade curtains adorned the windows and an artificial floral wreath hung on the front door. Feminine knick knacks decorated the shelves.
Since then, I’ve seen other homes like hers, though not in as extreme a situation. They are islands of civility. They affirm the truism that you can truly make a home anywhere if you really want to, though it may cost you many compromises and much hard work.
Expensive homes sometimes are much less homey than these oases in forlorn neighborhoods. Those who bring life and modest beauty to a depressing area perform acts of charity as well as work for their own pleasure and comfort.
Most importantly, they are exercising the virtue of hope.
You have to have hope to believe in beauty — to hold it in your heart when you are surrounded by its antithesis.
When rivers of traffic are flowing past your door, you have to believe that somewhere rivers of traffic don’t exist.
Somewhere there is no traffic at all.
Somewhere there are wide-open meadows.
Somewhere there are lush hills and larks diving into the swelling green.
Somewhere a fire is burning on the hearth. Somewhere beauty has claimed its final victory, and you are home forever.
If you secretly or unconsciously treasure this ideal you can help persevere it in making a home where so many hostile forces, including poverty, are pitted against it.
You need hope — and imagination — to attain the steely conviction that beauty exists even if don’t have it and can’t see it. And then you have to fight for it, even if your successes are modest and may not impress most people. That woman on her traffic island was taking a stand — all the more noble given that she lived in a neighborhood that consisted of one person and a streaming, faceless multitude behind steering wheels. She was saying, “This is my home, and I will love it no matter what.” It was an eccentric choice. But then defending personality in this cold, commercial society is a form of eccentricity. What could be more eccentric than the domestic conquest of a traffic island in New Jersey?
The “machine,” so to speak, would never overcome this widow. She had a home. Some people spend an inordinate amount of money on their houses because they don’t truly know what a home is. I wonder how many thousands of people speeding past her house day after day on waves of invisible exhaust and noise saw the traffic-stranded cottage and took the message of hope back to their own domestic islands. “Beauty,” said Dante, “awakens the soul to act.”
— Comments —
Patrick O’Brien writes:
Today’s mention of the woman who lived on a traffic island and maintained her beautiful home is a wonderful image of what Catholics have to do in the Satanic world of today. And the story brought to mind something I saw decades ago. I was riding the elevated train in Chicago, and alongside the tracks looking down I saw tenement houses with backyards devoid of grass, often full of junk. But one yard, fenced off from both neighbors, was full of grass. I still think, what fine, classy people must have lived in that building.
Laura writes:
We all live on traffic islands now.
