RHETORICS OF THE SMALL: THE EVERYDAY PHENOMENA OF THE HOME 

By 

Claire Oldham Griffith 

A DISSERTATION 

Submitted to  
Michigan State University 
in partial fulfillment of the requirements  
for the degree of 

Rhetoric and Writing —Doctor of Philosophy 

2025 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ABSTRACT 

This project investigates the experience of the home as both personal and socio/cultural 

phenomenon through creative-critical inquiry into the lives and homes of three generations of 

women in my family. Using a method I developed called “sensory interviewing” – an 

auto/ethnographical and reflexive form of video interviewing, I focus on capturing the intimate, 

lived experience of place and how material and everyday encounters shape our individual sense 

of “home.” By exploring the relationships between bodies, space, and time, I center the three 

unique stories of my sister, mother, and grandmother to gain insight into their embodied and 

sensory experiences of the home in how they come to ‘make’ a home, form a sense of place, and 

actively construct memory through engagement with the materiality of their daily lives. Building 

on scholarship in feminist theory, memory studies, phenomenology, multimodality, and cultural 

rhetorics, I theorize “rhetorics of the small” as an embodied practice of attunement to the 

everyday objects, stories, and practices that create meaning and memory across generations, 

most especially in sites not traditionally studied as rhetorical (e.g., the domestic/private sphere). 

The home, while not public, is rhetorical in how it serves as a starting point, as a place from 

which we go out from, in how we begin to make sense of our lived worlds. I argue that this 

entanglement of the senses, of memory, and the impressions we leave and are left on us by others 

serve as a necessary framework for understanding the reverberative e/affects of the small, 

everyday practices and actions as starting points for change. 

 
 
Copyright by 
CLAIRE OLDHAM GRIFFITH 
2025 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
For my son, who made me a mother. 
For my husband, and all the walks we took to get here. 
For my mother and sister, who gave me their time, their stories, their very hearts. 
And, most especially, for Alice. 
May your memory be what guides us home. 

 iv 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

This dissertation wouldn’t exist without the help and dedication of many people. I want 

to thank my committee – Alex Hidalgo, Stuart Blythe, and Julie Lindquist for their guidance and 

generosity throughout this entire process of my doctoral career. And especially my chair, 

Danielle DeVoss, and her unending support and optimism for what it can mean to write and make 

meaning in this world. And, of course, her incredibly quick turnaround time with feedback.  

I cannot begin to imagine what this project would look like without Jeanetta Mohlke-Hill. 

My best grad school friend, my writing buddy. From piloting my interview questions to 

brainstorming sessions to reviewing every word and offering new perspectives – you are in every 

piece of this work. We got this, friend.  

For my husband, Chayce, who helped me design an entire system for writing this 

dissertation (the STAR method), went with me on walks where I spewed writing nonsense, and 

brought me tea when I was stuck on a chapter – I actually couldn’t have done it without you. 

Trying to write a dissertation while massively pregnant is no joke, and somehow, you were able 

to push past all the brain fog and the anxiety to help me find what was at the core of this work, 

just waiting to be pulled forward.  

And of course, for my family. My uncles, aunts, cousins, in-laws, and grandparents – 

those who talked me through my project, who took the time to listen and to tell me stories. My 

dad, who sat with me to think as we always do, always knowing what questions to ask. My 

grandpa, who sat with my grandmother to fill in all the gaps, to help her feel safe and 

comfortable, and for all the incredible stories. I think you understood the importance of memory 

better than anyone.  

 v 

And for you – Olivia, Amy, Alice. The women who inspired this work, whose stories are 

this work. Olivia – for your wisdom and clarity that help me see the world in new ways. For 

mom – how you always told me the truth. And for Grandma – you will never read this, but I want 

you to know how much you carry with you – you are the rhetorics of the small.  

Home is all of you. Every word, every memory, every story – the things I carry with me 

and the people that make them matter, make them last. Thank you all.  

 vi 

 
TABLE OF CONTENTS 

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 1 

CHAPTER 2: METHODS ............................................................................................................ 21 

CHAPTER 3: THE CHAIR .......................................................................................................... 43 

CHAPTER 4: THE TABLE .......................................................................................................... 65 

CHAPTER 5: THE CABINET ..................................................................................................... 93 

CHAPTER 6: RHETORICS OF THE SMALL .......................................................................... 122 

BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................................... 139 

 vii 

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 

In the summer of 2023, I went home.  

I packed a bag to spend a month in Texas, with a video camera I rented from the 

Michigan State University videography lab. I’ve lived in Michigan for almost 4 years now while 

pursuing my PhD in Rhetoric and Writing at MSU. I met my now husband here only a month 

after moving and, at the time of writing this, we’re expecting our first child. I adore Michigan – 

the lakes, the trees, even the winters with the way the snow looks piled over the cars, on the roofs 

of the buildings.  

But Texas will always be home.  

It’s where my entire family is from – aunts, uncles, grandparents. We’re spread out across 

the entirety of the strange state, in all of its variety of 

terrain, weather, and cultures. Visiting my parents in 

Lubbock, Texas still puts me 5 hours away from the nearest 

large city, Dallas, where my dad’s mother lives. My 

younger sister lives between the two cities in a tiny town 

called Wichita Falls, near the Oklahoma border, which still 

Figure 1: My grandparents, in 
their kitchen in Lubbock, Texas 

puts her 3 hours away from Lubbock. 

And so, for the month of June, I 

found myself traveling across the expanse 

of the state, seeing family I hadn’t seen 

for months or years, filming every step of 

the way. I stayed in Lubbock for the 

Figure 2: Our old house in Celina, Texas 

majority of the time, driving around, hanging out with my younger brother who is still in high 

 1 

school, sitting with my mom in the kitchen. My mother’s parents also live in Lubbock, they 

moved there within the past couple of years, all the way from East Texas – and I would go and 

visit them, sitting on their back porch or on the plaid couch that they’ve had since before I was 

born. My parents and I at one point drove to the Dallas area to visit my dad’s mother and got 

lunch with my uncle’s family while we were in town. While we were in the area, we drove about 

45 minutes north outside of town for the anniversary party of some old family friends to Celina, 

Texas where we had lived from when I was 8 to right after I turned 15. We drove by the house 

my parents built when we moved there to see if it had changed. To me, it looked about the same.  

On the way back to Lubbock, my parents dropped me off at my sister’s house in Wichita 

Falls to stay with her for a week. I followed her around to different parties her friends were 

hosting, or to the coffee shop where she worked part time baking pastries and cookies on 

Monday and Tuesday mornings. Every time we would drive by the apartment complex she lived 

in when she first moved there, I’d get such 

vivid flashbacks of the weirdness for both of 

us moving during a pandemic, and what it was 

like to drive away when we got her moved in. 

We had never lived in different cities before.  

And as I made my way back to 

Lubbock, I found myself staring out the 

window watching the sheer nothingness of the 

expanse of West Texas. Perfectly flat, for 

miles and miles and miles. A place made up only of sky.  

Figure 1: A map of Texas (cities listed from 
right to left: Lubbock, Wichita Falls, Dallas, 
Celina, Gladewater) 

What a strange place to call home.  

 2 

A strange beauty, a strange collection of memories, of feelings, of people – beautiful in 

their familiarity, 

beautiful in the way 

these small things start 

to add up, form 

patterns that I seem to 

see in the land itself as 

if it’s calling to me, 

beckoning me to return.  

*** 

Figure 2: Lubbock, Texas 

I told anyone who asked about the project I was working on. It’s about home, I would 

say. The experience of home, what home feels like, to you – almost like, the senses.  

“The senses?” people would say. And then, they would start talking.  

“You want to talk about senses,” said an aunt that I happened to be able to catch up with 

at the beginning of the trip, “when I was a kid, we moved constantly. I think we must've lived in 

I think 27 houses before I turned 18.” She paused.  

“But I always had the same shampoo.”  

She described how she could create a sort of safe space in the familiarity of scents – 

soaps and oils, she could take the scents with her. I pointed out with a smile the essential oil 

diffuser she had sitting next to her while she talked. “Ah,” she said, “See I didn’t even notice, it’s 

like second nature at this point.” 

My uncle at this point chimed in, “I always think of the smell of the linen closet. At my 

mother’s house, at my grandmother’s house. It was just… fresh…” he trailed off. Clean bed 

 3 

sheets, freshly washed towels – this connection point between two generations in his family, the 

smell of fresh linens.  

And then, weeks later, at my dad’s mother’s house, we call her Nonnie, a different set of 

aunts and uncles were around, listening to my explanation of the sensory experience of the home 

and my uncle perks up.  

“Oh, so you mean like the cookie jar?” He points across the 

room of my Nonnie's house to a white cookie jar in the shape of a 

dog on the kitchen counter. “I think I could recognize that sound 

anywhere” – the sound of the cookie jar opening and closing. And 

Figure 3: The cookie jar 

what’s so interesting to me is that he’s right, that cookie jar has been sitting there in that exact 

spot in my Nonnie’s kitchen for my entire life and it would have never occurred to me that this 

would be my uncle’s first thought when he considered the sound of home.  

When we were visiting family friends, the large group’s conversation turned more to the 

question of “what do you see?” What do you picture when you think of home?  

The answers ranged from a family around a dinner table, setting up a Christmas tree, the 

way the furniture would always be in a new configuration – a constant state of fluctuation, of 

movement. People talked about their relationships with their parents, all the good and bad and 

complexity of family and memory and growing up.  

When I had asked this same question to my friend Jeanetta in preparation for this trip, 

testing out my thoughts, my interview questions, what I was going to do and say and film while 

home in Texas, she thought back to the multiple states and cities and houses and apartments 

she’d lived in throughout her younger life. 

 4 

“I see… plants. I see my mom. My dogs running around.” She paused. “It’s kind of 

weird, it’s like the people, the living things in the space.” Growing, moving, changing – life. 

The sights, smells, sounds of life. What does it mean to be at home?  

To be, in every sense – what does it feel like? To live, to grow in different spaces over 

time? What do we notice? Because I feel as though there might be something to this idea of 

home as something we feel, something we touch, taste, smell, hear through our lived bodily 

experiences of place, our relationships with others, our relationships with the things around us 

that are so familiar it’s as if they’re engraved in our skin, in our very bones.  

The stories, spaces, places, memories, feelings, sights, sounds, smells of… home.  

***  

In this dissertation project I chose to investigate the daily, lived experiences of “home” by 

exploring the relationships between bodies, space, and time–the material and everyday 

encounters that shape our sense of place and sense of self. Drawing on phenomenological theory, 

cultural rhetorics and feminist scholarship, I situate the home as both personal and socio/cultural 

phenomenon and a site of rhetorical inquiry into the individual and embodied realities of how we 

come to know and experience the world around us. Our homes, from the small scale to the large 

scale, from specific houses to the neighborhoods, cities, states, countries that we come to know 

intimately over time, have a propensity to intrinsically shape our sense of identity as individuals, 

but also have deep e/affects on our sense of belonging and our larger socio-cultural positionality.  

While “home is a fundamental and universal concept,” says Fox (2016) in the book 

Home: A very short introduction,1 “…it has multiple associated and layered meanings for 

1 As a part of Oxford University Press’s “Very Short Introductions” series, authors cover a wide range of topics and 
attempt to give an overview of those topics for a general audience. I find this type of overview helpful in situating 
how I come to understand the extremely broad topic of home as a site of inquiry.   

 5 

 
different people in a great range of circumstances,” ultimately surprising us “by turning out to be 

a restless, shifting, somewhat elusive notion” (p. 1). It is many things to many people. Even 

within our own lived experiences, the question of home and its meaning in our life is likely in a 

constant state of fluctuation. As I’ve begun this study, I’ve noticed a strong correlation between 

home and memory, for example – the way the home invokes the past. For family I haven’t seen 

in years, for old friends and new, when I ask them to consider their idea of home (sights, smells, 

sounds), it brings forth things from all stages of our lives, a rich tapestry of their own stories, the 

stories of the people close to us. Home is our childhood, our families, our past, present, future.  

I came to be interested in the topic of home because of its fluidity -- home as not static or 

fixed, but rather entrenched in interrelated issues of culture, memory, space/place, power 

relations, and lived experience. Home is not and cannot be one thing for all people. Therefore, 

the phenomena of the home, as seen in this dissertation project, is just that, a multitude of 

phenomena in and of the home – experiences, senses, places, objects, people, relationships – 

interrelated and interconnected, unable to be separated from each other. Home is a part of who 

we are, as human beings, it is where we’re from and to where we will return.  

This dissertation will take a fluid approach, blending the personal and the theoretical, the 

creative and the critical in order to tell the stories of how things come to matter in our lives. And 

how, if we pay attention, the ‘small things’ – the everyday details, practices, and repeated actions 

of our lived worlds – will begin to help us make sense of our surroundings by bringing to the 

surface what matters to us. As individuals, in our relationships, and in our larger cultural and 

societal contexts. For me, this is an intrinsically rhetorical practice, drawing on a definition of 

“rhetorics” given by Powel et al. (2014) in Our story begins here: Constellating cultural 

rhetorics, in which rhetorics “refers both to the study of meaning-making systems and to the 

 6 

practices that constitute those systems.” I find that a broad understanding of what ‘counts’ as 

rhetorical practice is a key underlying argument of where we look to find rhetorical meaning and 

what it means to ‘make’ theory.  

Therefore, in order to theorize what I call a “rhetorics of the small,” I begin with an 

overview of how I came to this project by introducing the phenomenological concept of life-

worlds as an example of how I am theorizing the home as way of situating us in the world – a 

place from which we go out into the world around us. Drawing on the feminist notion of situated 

knowledges,2 I argue for the importance of the project itself being based on my own situating and 

how the personal, the embodied, and the stories that matter to us give us rich insight into larger 

socio-cultural theory – including, I argue, the history of the home as gendered space, and of 

home-making as gendered labor. The home as a representation of the private sphere, the 

domestic, as a site for “women’s work,” is often underrepresented as rhetorical in its own right, 

in the way that theories of cultural rhetorics situate “everyday practices” as intrinsically 

rhetorical. 3  

My next chapter features my methodology and begins to introduce the stories behind the 

three interviews I conducted during the month I spent at home in Texas. The next three chapters 

focus on these interviews and the nuanced narratives of the relationships between objects, 

bodies, space, and time as they are seen in and through the home. My conclusion focuses on a 

“rhetorics of the small” as attunement practice that calls us as scholars and as humans to look 

closely and carefully into the uniqueness of the everyday, and the impressions we leave and are 

left on us by our homes and the people who make us feel at home. 

2 See Haraway (1988) as well as Harding (1986) and Collins (1997) 
3 See “Our story begins here,” Powell et al. 2014 

 7 

 
So come with me as I return to the places I come from, the people that made me who I 

am, the stories and memories that shaped me as I have shaped them – a circular making, a 

pattern, a tiny moment that sticks in the brain, telling us to pay attention. 

*** 

I step outside my door.  

The door to my apartment in Holt, Michigan, where I live with my husband; the door of 

the studio space I lived in in downtown Lansing; the front door of my parent’s house in Lubbock, 

Texas; the door to the house I lived in with my sister before the pandemic, or the crappy 

apartment before that. The old house I lived in with roommates, the different houses my parents 

rented before they bought their current one. The apartment in Belize. The house in Celina, Texas. 

The houses I can barely remember when I was a child and my parents lived in the suburbs of 

Dallas, Texas.  

I step outside my door.  

Leaving, just for a while, until my inevitable return, where I walk back through the door, 

right back the way I came, and step through the threshold into what is, at least for now, home.  

*** 

In phenomenology, the home is seen as, according to Bachelard, “a privileged entity” in 

the way it emphasizes the intimate – the spatial relationships, in all their complexity, within the 

home and between the home and the outside world (1964/1994, p. 3). Phenomenology would 

indeed be interested in these relationships, because phenomenology, as I have come to 

understand it, is about relationships – or, more specifically, the relationships between bodies, 

space and time. Much like Sara Ahmed in her introduction to Queer Phenomenology, my 

interpretation of phenomenology as relationships is likely “not properly phenomenology” (2006, 

 8 

p. 2). Ahmed’s book, for example, is specifically queering phenomenology, taking cues from 

feminist and queer theory to emphasize how:   

“Phenomenology can offer a resource for queer studies insofar as it emphasizes the 
importance of lived experience, the intentionality of consciousness, the significance of 
nearness or what is ready-to-hand, and the role of repeated and habitual actions in 
shaping bodies and worlds” (2006, p. 2). 

So, while not being a more traditional understanding of phenomenology, Ahmed draws on 

phenomenology as a resource to better emphasize the relevance of lived experience, 

intentionality, nearness, repeated and habitual actions. Our lived lives matter, the way we make 

sense of the world around us matters, and how what is close to us – familiar, proximate, near – 

affects our daily lives, the lived repeated actions of what it is to be human directly shapes our 

bodies, minds, and perspectives of the world. This in turn, shapes the world itself.  

In this, I see relationships. I see home.  

The relations and relationships we have as embodied beings experiencing and perceiving 

the physical, the spatial, and the temporal are what it is to dwell in our life-world – our lived 

world, the world of experience. In phenomenology, life-world is a term coined by Husserl, the 

understood “founder” of phenomenology, to refer to the foundational grounding for shared 

human experiences. “[T]he life-world,” he says, “for us who are wakingly live in it, is always 

already there, existing in advance for us, the ‘ground’ of all praxis…” as a sort of “backdrop for 

our perceptual experiences…” (Husserl, 1954/1970, p. 142, Moran, 2012, p. 188). For Husserl, 

whose establishment of phenomenology was embedded in a concern for knowing and how we 

come to know – questions of science, objectivity, and truth – it was crucial to establish the idea 

of a lived world, a world of perception, that serves as a base in which we all stand, experiencing 

our own, inherently subjective, lives. “The life-world,” according to Moran, “has to be 

understood as including everything that is experienceable, the horizon of all experience” (2012, 

 9 

 
p. 189). Thus, the lifeworld, according to Husserl, consists of how we ‘come to know’ “through 

seeing, touching, feeling, hearing etc., […] through ‘repetition’ of the experiences” (p. 343). It is 

through our senses that we come to know – our lived, bodily experiences – and the daily, 

repeated actions of those experiences in the everyday, that make up the composition of our life-

world.  

I wonder, then, if the home as a concept could be understood as a miniature life-world; 

life-world on the small scale. If home is where we’re from, where we live, is it not its own type 

of backdrop? A location of living, a “horizon” from which we go out and experience the life part 

of life-world?  

In Queer Phenomenology, Ahmed discusses Husserl’s writings on his experience at the 

writing table – in his home, at his desk – and how this serves a starting point for his perceiving 

experience. He sees first the paper, the wood of the table, the room, the window to the backyard 

where his children play.  

She says, “It is from here that the world unfolds.” 

I was struck by this quote – dropped in italics in the midst of Ahmed’s discussion of 

Husserl’s writing study.  

It is from here that the world unfolds… I step outside my door.  

The home is place – a “here” from which the world unfolds – a location, in which we 

dwell, a base in which we build off of and make sense of the world around us. It situates us, 

orients us, and shapes us as we shape it.  

In feminist scholarship, Donna Haraway (1988) discusses the importance of situated 

knowledges – a concept of “limited location” that helps us consider how knowledge is made as 

an inherently embodied experience. In addressing the objectivity of science, she argues that 

 10 

“Feminists don’t need a doctrine of objectivity that promises transcendence, a story that loses 

track of its mediations just where someone might be held responsible for something, and 

unlimited instrumental power” (Haraway, 1988). Essentially, it is an inherently feminist notion to 

call into question that which rises above our experiences, promising objectivity in its 

transcendence of body (and therefore, transcendence of responsibility). Instead, she calls for a 

“particular and specific embodiment” that grants us partial vision to ground us in the reality of 

our limitations, allowing us to “become answerable for what we learn how to see” (Haraway, 

1988).4  

We are limited to this one experience, this one body, location, background, home. But 

also how beautiful, to be limited. It calls us to be situated, to have a grounded sense of place and 

space, of what is around us, of our embodied experiences of the world as the medium through 

which we make sense of and make knowledges within, the lived and living world around us.  

It is from here that the world unfolds.  

***  

For this dissertation project, I focus on the lived experiences of three women in my 

family. My younger sister – an interior designer, who brings to the table really interesting 

thoughts on how the home functions and we function within it; my mother -- an artist who paints 

customizable maps on Etsy that tell people’s individual stories of place and home; and my 

grandmother – described by my mother as the ‘super homemaker,’ my grandmother was 

4 Though it’s a bit beyond the scope of this project, it should be noted that this ‘situatedness’ as an acknowledgement 
of embodiment, is a crucial foreground for feminist concepts such as positionality, which call us to acknowledge 
where we come from in our research, teaching, and other work, and intersectionality, which calls us to acknowledge 
how intersecting identities lead to unique positionalities and experiences of discrimination and privilege (see 
Kimberlé Crenshaw 1989 work “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”). 

 11 

 
diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in the past couple of years, forcing her and my grandfather to move 

out of the home they had lived in for almost 50 years.  

I feel it is necessary to enter into this conversation of the phenomena of the home through 

my situating – through my own experience. This project is an exploration into the lives and 

thoughts of three specific women in my life who have all three in some way, inspired my original 

interest in home. It is through this personal experience that I feel I am able to do the most 

interesting work in my own theorizing of home. To focus on the personal is a way of grounding 

home as a personal phenomenon, situated and lived, in order to make connections to the home as 

a larger cultural and social phenomenon.  

Ahmed in Living a Feminist Life, begins with this idea:  

This book is personal. The personal is theoretical. Theory itself is often assumed to be 
abstract: something is more theoretical the more abstract it is, the more it is abstracted 
from everyday life. To abstract is to drag away, detach, pull away, or divert. We might 
then have to drag theory back, to bring theory back to life. (p. 10).  

I love this concept; I think it’s crucial. Ahmed identifies the relationship between the 

personal and theoretical as a type of grounding, a way of situating theory in the lived world, an 

embodied, story-based theory. She specifically talks about how reading works by black feminists 

and feminists of color including Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Gloria Anzaldúa was incredibly 

inspiring. She says, “Here was writing in which an embodied experience of power provides the 

basis of knowledge. Here was writing animated by the everyday: the detail of an encounter, an 

incident, a happening, flashing like insight” (p. 10). It is through the personal, through the 

embodied that we come to know, but how often are these ways of knowing specifically and 

systemically undervalued in Western notions of “what counts” as theory? 

 12 

 
It brings to mind the seminal article by Barbara Christian (1988) in A race for theory, that 

clearly questions what we count as theory as tied directly to western-centric, male, white, 

dominant cultural construction. Christian argues the following: “For people of color have always 

theorized – but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic” (1988, p. 68). 

It’s the “in forms quite different” that stands out to me. Christian’s conception of these different 

forms is revealed to be ‘often narrative forms’ – “in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, 

in the play with language, because dynamic rather than fixed ideas seem more to our liking” 

(1988, p. 68).  

Christian, and other black feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial scholars argue for how 

story and storytelling work as a site through which research, theorizations, knowledge-making, 

and rhetorical practice take place. In the seminal article, “Our story begins here: Constellating 

cultural rhetorics,” the authors argue for the importance of story and storytelling as a primary 

methodology for understanding and making rhetorical meaning, taking cues from indigenous 

scholars such as Thomas King’s (2003) theorization of the power stories and storytelling have in 

shaping our sense of self and our connection to the world around us. King (2003) begins each 

chapter of the novel with the following statement: "the truth about stories is that that's all we 

are." In an article by White (1980), he situates narrative as an almost inevitable aspect of the 

human experience despite the “domains of contemporary Western intellectual and artistic 

culture” who “programmatically refuse” to acknowledge its profound power in the construction 

of reality itself (p. 5).  

Story and storytelling have the unique ability to serve as both personal and cultural, to be 

about identity and society. Our identities and sense of the world are deeply and intrinsically tied 

to the stories we tell, the stories we are told, and our relationships with others. Relationality is an 

 13 

idea situated in indigenous and cultural rhetorics scholarship – specifically as noted in Shawn 

Wilson’s Research is Ceremony (2008), as "relationships do not merely shape reality, they are 

reality" (p. 7, emphasis original). Here we see another reality claim – stories and relationships 

are valued here as a type of worldmaking. They shape the way we see the world, the way we 

shape the world, and the way the world is shaped around us – this is cultural practice, this is 

rhetorical practice. As noted in “Our story begins here,” “All cultural practices are built, shaped, 

and dismantled based on the encounters people have with one another within and across 

particular systems of shared belief. In other words, people make things (texts, baskets, 

performances), people make relationships, people make culture” (2014).  

The truth about stories is that that’s all we are.5 

Therefore, for this dissertation project, I sought to conduct video interviews that told the 

stories of the three women who have shaped me and shaped each other – mother to mother. A 

maternal lineage that makes it way down through the home itself, through objects passed down, 

through memories and moments that have lasting e/affects on what it is to be at home, what it is 

to know and be known in the places that make us who we are. Each chapter is meant to celebrate 

the stories, theories, and homes of my sister, mother, and grandmother as sites of rhetorical and 

embodied knowledge-making. By attuning to repeated patterns and actions embedded in the 

daily, lived experiences of these three women I hope to tell their stories in order to better tell 

mine, and to gain some type of insight into their experiences of home as theory. 

In each chapter I explore in more detail our embodied relationships with objects (my 

sister), place (my mother), and time (my grandmother). I am interested in the daily, lived 

5 King, T. (2003). The truth about stories.  

 14 

 
experiences of these three women – what they feel, experiences, sense, remember. How do they 

think about home? The materiality of home? Home as place? The way home changes over time? 

This dissertation is for them; it is by them. It is my sister’s confidence, my mother’s 

precision, my grandmother’s loss. Their stories matter, their relationships to me and with each 

other matter. The places they come from matter – their homes, their lives, and the everyday sense 

making between the people, places, and objects in which they interact.  

*** 

There are knowledges weaved into the construction of the houses I grew up in… I see a 

grandmother sitting at a table with her young granddaughter, snapping peas for the meal – I see 

her showing her the specifics of her needlework. Do you see how her fingers move? Do you see 

the precision and delicacy, the skill and the beauty? Were they not building knowledges?  

*** 

In the book, Women’s ways of making, Goggin and Rose (2021) begin their introduction 

with the idea that “making as embodied knowledge has been, in a word, gendered, rendering it as 

ostensibly inept,” and that embodied knowledge itself has been “overlooked, ignored, or 

disparaged as inferior to other forms of expression or thinking that seem to leave the material 

world behind” (p. 4). Women’s makings, as a type of embodied knowledge, are an attunement to 

a type of knowledge making in rhetorical studies that goes beyond words, something found in the 

daily objects and practices of women throughout history. The field of rhetorical studies often 

tends towards an emphasis on logos, as in the way language, the written word, and other 

‘abstract forms of logic’ to quote Christian (1988) again, shape knowledge and knowledge 

making. Arellano’s (2022) article on “Quilting as a qualitative, feminist research method” begins 

her argument with a challenge given in Goggin’s 2004 chapter on “the visual verbal divide” in 

 15 

the field by identifying two main questions in Goggin’s argument that still remain relevant to the 

field today: “(1) How does a logocentric approach limit the field by limiting what counts as 

rhetorical practices and who count as rhetoricians, and (2) how do we study the rhetoric of those 

who do not have access to dominant spaces and resources?” (2022).  

I remember vividly the experience of reading a work on the history of women in rhetoric 

where the author talks about different methods for ‘locating’ women or alternative voices in 

rhetorical studies, because unfortunately, according to the author,  

“…the hope to recuperate alternative voices has long been abandoned: there are simply 
no oppositional texts awaiting to be recovered, no extant papyri to be retrieved, no 
manuscripts by women or slaves to be reclaimed. (Poulakos, 1994, pp. 59-60)  

No more texts?  

It depends, greatly, on what we count as texts in the first place. Gaillet and Bailey (2019) 

in Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work ask us to consider “Beyond 

who is left out historically and what version of her life is preserved […but rather] what is left 

out: which rhetorical acts are valued, investigated, and remembered and which are not and, as a 

result, which women continue to be silenced” (p. 13). Who is left out? What is left out? And for 

me, most importantly, where do we look?  

Therefore, as seen in Bizzell’s 1992 on feminist research in the history of rhetoric, “…to 

find women in the rhetorical tradition, we must look where those women were speaking and 

writing, even if those venues deviate from the traditional public sphere.” The home, as the 

domestic sphere, as the private sphere, has continually been known as the “woman’s place” for 

“women’s work,” and as being so gendered, reduces and devalues it as a type of space in the 

background of society, taken for granted as a source of rhetorical meaning-making and 

knowledge production. However, as seen in Jessica Enoch’s work in Domestic occupations: 

 16 

 
Spatial rhetorics and women’s work (2019), “domestic spaces function in our patterns of life and 

our patterns of thought,” according to a review by Walden (2020). The domestic space is a rich 

source of rhetorical theory in terms of spatial rhetorics, gender politics, generational knowledges, 

and the rhetorical decision-making power of everyday makings.  

For home itself is not just a neutral site in which meaning-making might take place, but a 

complex spatial narrative that is often specifically rhetorically constructed. Spatial rhetorics, as 

defined by Enoch (2019), are “the multimodal ways through which spaces gain meaning” – this 

includes “the material elements that create the space, as well as the pictorial, embodied, 

displayed, emotive, and discursive understandings that define what a space is and what it should 

be,” suggesting the purpose of the space, how different people move through different spaces, 

and how different places become significant to us for different reasons. The home itself, the 

space, the rooms, and what those spaces and rooms do and occupy, are made. They reveal much 

about our lives, our values, our daily structures, and, for some, the construction of these spaces 

can often serve as a type of self-expression. Women, throughout history have been attributed to 

the practice of “home-making” – the set-up, maintenance, and care for a home – the daily tasks 

that we associate with what it is to be at home. In considering, then, the home as something that 

is made, often of everyday care practices, we can begin to see how the home is rhetorical, in the 

sense that “rhetorics are made through everyday practices,” according to “Our story begins here” 

(2014).  

However, in considering the home as gendered space, we also must consider the deeply 

complex histories of women and other marginalized groups within these spheres and the ways in 

which power, privilege, and oppression have shifted in the relationship between gendered labor 

and issues of race, class, sexuality, etc. There is nothing simple about the perceived relationships 

 17 

between the societal structures of gender, space, and labor. Issues of intersectionality and power 

have and will continue shape our collective, embodied interactions with home and hopefully 

further complicate how we think about the home historically.6 The way we think about our own 

mothers, and their mothers, and their mothers, and the complex dynamics that were 

communicated to us in different ways will continue to change, but also help us understand the 

richness of history, memory, and the relationships between the personal and the cultural.  

My grandmother’s life and the societal/cultural expectations put upon her in the 1950s 

and 60s differ greatly from my mother’s experiences growing up in the 70s and 80s. My 

understanding of my grandmother’s mother, and her mother, are vastly different in how they 

worked and lived and functioned within societal structures, and what, through this process, they 

passed down to their children. An interesting point of inquiry, for me, however, is by examining 

and thinking about how each of these women conceived and interacted with the home. Many of 

the women in my life care deeply for their homes, in many different ways, no matter their 

differing conceptions of gender and gendered labor as it relates to the home and home-making.  

So, if rhetorics are made through everyday practices according to Powell et al. (2014), 

cultures, then, “are made up of practices that accumulate over time and in relationship to specific 

places” (emphasis added). It is over time that we begin to make sense of the practices that make 

up what it is to be in relationship with others and in relationship with place. It is over time that 

knowledges are passed down, over time that we begin to notice the repeated patterns in what it is 

to know, learn, grow, and be. In this dissertation I want to focus on this notion of time, the 

6 I’m thinking specifically about Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique (1963) as often credited as the spark of 
second wave feminism, was specifically about women’s relationships to motherhood, the home, and home-making. 
However, Friedan’s argument is focused specifically on white, middle-class women, without consideration of the 
intersectional realities facing working class women and women of color. 

 18 

 
e/affects of time and memory, as it relates to our relationships with the material realities of our 

world and our embodied experiences of the things in a space. How are embodied knowledges 

passed down over time? How are material knowledges passed down over time? What are the 

relationships between time and the physical space and physical objects we encounter in our daily 

lives? How do we come to know and experience these material encounters through our lived 

bodies? And how does all of this (bodies, space, time) e/affect the way we interact with others? 

What stories do we need to tell?  

I don’t anticipate answering these questions, I anticipate sitting in these questions – 

sitting in the complexity of the things overlooked, and what they might reveal about the 

questions of time and bodies and space. The way my sister engages with the objects around her, 

the way my mother comes to know and have a sense of ‘place,’ the way my grandmother’s body 

and mind slowly fade with time, as the memories she helped create in us entangle themselves 

into our very being. How, by looking closely, we find the meaning embedded in the rhythms of 

our daily lives and what those patterns reveal about ourselves and how we move through the 

world.  

What might it mean, to see? 

*** 

In Husserl’s discussion of life-worlds, he clarifies a term he uses to describe what it might 

be to experience, to notice, the life-world as this foundational background to what we know and 

experience. The term is “wakingly,” which he defines as “being awake to the world, being 

constantly and directly ‘conscious’ of the world and of oneself as living in the world, actually 

experiencing and actually effecting […] the world” (p. 142-143). 

 19 

This is a core tenet of phenomenology – a sort of conscious attunement to one’s world, 

one’s body – what it means to actively pay attention.  

Notice how your body feels – are you sitting? Standing? What sounds are around you? 

What does the light look like where you are? What objects are in your reach? What emotions are 

you feeling?  

I’ve always loved the preface of Engelland’s 2021 book on phenomenology, where he 

compares the first time he wore glasses at the age of 16 to the story of Sherlock Holmes’s 

attention to the ‘invisible details’ -- “not invisible but unnoticed, Watson” (p. xi). The world in 

high definition, suddenly seeing, for the first time, individual blades of grass. Engelland 

summarizes, “Like good detective work, phenomenology enhances perception so that we notice 

all that is important in what seems to be small” (p. xi). The unnoticed, the ordinary, the everyday.  

This is cultural rhetorics practice, this is feminist historiography, this is phenomenology – 

what can we learn to see in the small? 

*** 

I think I am made up of all of the places I've ever slept, of all of the places I've longed to 

return to, of all of the times where I've sat underneath some random blanket that I never knew 

was either painstakingly homemade or bought at Walmart for $15 dollars, but it didn't matter. 

Because in that moment I was the safest I've ever felt. Wrapped in an old quilt, a cheap throw, a 

knitted masterpiece with stains on the back from numerous coffee spills. Someone is beside me, I 

am alone. The TV is on in the background, it's perfectly silent. Light flickers through the 

window. And I am home.  

 20 

 
 
CHAPTER 2: METHODS 

It must’ve been a couple of years ago now, but I remember working on some big project 

in my office in Bessey Hall at MSU – it could’ve been my concentration exam or a seminar 

paper for one of my classes, just something big enough to where I felt like I lived in that office, 

at that chair. And my officemate and fellow grad-student-in-arms, Jeanetta, and I spent an 

evening laughing with a giddiness that only comes from project-based sleep deprivation about 

how often I was using the phrase “taking cues.”  

“Taking cues from such and such book…” 

“Taking cues from such and such scholar…”  

This had, apparently, become my go-to phrase. I had to stop and go back to reword some 

of the sentences to better convey that same idea without relying on too much repetition. The 

phrase “taking cues” had started to lose all meaning… why did that phrase, that writing move 

specifically, seem to convey in my sleep-addled mind something poignant, something scholarly 

or profound. What does it mean to take cues?  

The idea of “cues” can be taken from the stage – a signal for a performer to enter or begin 

their performance. It can act as a prompt for memory, a prompt for action, an indication of how 

to move forward. It is, to me, a starting point. A place from which to begin, while still 

acknowledging and establishing a long history, a time before this moment. Where thoughts 

already existed – we don’t exist in a vacuum. We come from somewhere. Our ideas are situated 

in a complex world of interconnecting people, objects, and places.  

Therefore, I often find myself using that qualifier “taking cues” when establishing 

scholarship that is extremely influential to the work I’m doing. I use it like a phrase that says, “I 

want to do what they’re doing.” It’s almost like… gratitude. A citational nod to ideas of the past, 

 21 

as our work does not, and should not, ever exist in isolation. We are always building off of 

(taking cues) from numerous other works, ideas, theories, and writings that came before us. In 

what Sara Ahmed calls an “intellectual genealogy,” she argues that, “citation is feminist memory. 

Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find 

our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow” 

(2017, pp. 15-16). It is through citation that we build knowledge, and through citation that we 

can trace back to ideas that came before, and, in doing so, have the opportunity to make specific 

moves and arguments for who and how we cite. We can forge new paths, new lines, that have the 

potential to go beyond and outside of disciplinary boundaries, that bring to light scholars that are 

often overlooked or ignored in specific fields.  

This idea is important to me as I attempt to situate myself and the work of this 

dissertation within a larger intellectual history – within the field of rhetoric and writing, within 

feminist scholarship, and work in cultural rhetorics, phenomenology, multimodality, memory 

studies, etc. This work is inherently interdisciplinary in its call for questioning where we look for 

meaning-making and how we ourselves become situated as lived beings who ‘come to know’ 

through our embodied, sensed experiences. I take cues from a wide array of scholarship – my 

own intellectual genealogy, as well as the knowledges and practices from the data I collected 

through interviews with my family – my familial genealogy. I am able then to situate myself as a 

researcher, but also as a daughter, granddaughter, and sister, to people who have known me long 

before I had any sort of scholarly responsibility to uphold. My positionality as a researcher, 

daughter, granddaughter, sister, and scholar all become slightly blurred in this work, but in that 

blurring, I think I am surprisingly able to better understand my positioning. As a cis-het white 

woman from the south, I think it is important to acknowledge the limitations of my embodied, 

 22 

lived experiences, and what acknowledging those limitations can afford me as I seek a deeper 

understanding of how we each come to know and be positioned to move through the world with 

a unique type of embodied perspective.  

The way we position ourselves, then, I see as a type of family tree – our experiences, 

past, present, and future, all working together to tell a larger story of connection. Where we come 

from, where we are now -- an acknowledgment of those who have contributed to developing my 

own consciousness and a way of navigating my way through the interconnections of ideas, 

people, places, theories, that have brought me to where I am now, and will continue to shape 

where I go from here. So come with me as I follow the cues of those before me, the scholarship 

and the stories that shape me and shape this dissertation. There are paths and places I have 

already been and those I still have yet to reach, let us trace back to a type of beginning, a starting 

point on a map, a place from which we start to see a story begin to unfold.  

*** 

In the summer of 2023, I went home.  

When originally planning the idea for this project, I knew that I wanted to spend at least a 

month back in my home state of Texas in order to have enough time to conduct interviews with 

my sister, mother, and grandmother, but also to simply be in those spaces -- I needed to somehow 

capture a sense of the place, the cities, the specific houses, the way it felt to drive down the road. 

I needed to be at home (in the state of Texas, in the city of Lubbock, in my mom’s house), how it 

felt to be at home, in my body, see what memories it brought to the surface. And I needed to see 

if I could find a way to capture those same feelings with the three people I wanted to center in 

this dissertation project. My sister, having moved to Wichita Falls, several years prior, how she 

made a home in the small town three hours from Lubbock; my mother, with her house in 

 23 

Lubbock that she and my dad were so proud of owning outright after years of renting; my 

grandmother, having been almost forced to move to Lubbock to be closer to my mom and how 

her and my grandfather were slowly but surely making their new house feel more like the 

“grandma and grandpa’s house” that my siblings and I grew up with.  

So, with a rented 

video camera in tow, I 

spent the month of June 

2023 filming everything 

I could think of -- my 

sister and I driving to the 

grocery store, a shot of 

myself sitting outside on 

my parent’s back porch, the drive into Lubbock, 

Texas in all of its flat desert-like nothingness. I 

filmed the houses, the trees, my grandmother’s 

bookshelf. I shakily filmed my grandparents and I 

going through a tin of old buttons that I had played 

Figure 4: driving to the grocery store, a 
Lubbock landscape, a table covered in 
buttons 

with as a child. I needed to capture the people, the place, the objects, the stories. I needed to 

capture their movements – their bodily, sensed experiences of their daily lives, how it felt to sit 

with them, to watch them while they moved through space, interacted with the things around 

them. And I needed to capture their memories – the way they told stories, the way the objects and 

artifacts around them elicited story, brought them back into the past, helped them make sense of 

the present.  

 24 

I wanted to capture what it was for each of them to live. 

*** 

Though it wasn’t required, I made the decision to pursue approval through the 

Institutional Review Board at Michigan State University for this project. As I was conducting 

interviews and going into people’s homes, even if those homes were the homes of my own 

family, I wanted to seek specific ways of ethically engaging with the research process as dictated 

by the university. In this review, I identified “the objectives of the study” as threefold: 1) to 

interview three female family members to document their sense of and experiences with “home,” 

2) to analyze the data to articulate trends and themes across the three cases and 3) to offer 

recommendations for how “home” can be considered a rhetorical, culturally situated site of 

inquiry. 

I suppose this sounds pretty, this description of the project using the language of more 

traditional notions of research, of methods, of what it means to produce knowledge. I would not 

go as far to say that it is even inaccurate – these are indeed the moves I am making in the project. 

I did interview my sister, mother, and grandmother; I did seek to identify themes within these 

interviews – patterns and theories and stories that carried their way across the experiences of 

these three women. I do indeed see this project as a way of offering the notion of “home” as 

rhetorical, as cultural, as a site of inquiry that has been deeply undervalued historically, 

academically, societally; and what this affords us as we consider how we make meaning in the 

world. And yet, there is a sense of something missing – a story that isn’t being told in the IRB 

description, a reduction, a lessening that brings us to something that falls short of what I feel this 

project is doing or seeking to do. It lacks certain nuance, which is something I was advised not to 

try and include in the IRB review in the first place, as nuance is, apparently, ‘not what IRB is 

 25 

for.’ In the context of university policy and other legal requirements, the goal of IRB is truly just 

to make sure that some type of objective harm is not being caused by the research we do, and is 

not as interested in the complexities of what it means to tell stories, to engage with human beings 

in dynamic ways that consider their inner feelings and lived bodily experiences, in a way that is 

often messy and strange and changing constantly.  

And I think I see this most clearly in the second aspect of the IRB review – my 

description of my interview questions. I broke my interview questions up into 2 sections – the 

first for a more traditional interview of each participant sitting in front of a camera, and the 

second for walking around their homes with them. 

The first set of the interview questions were as follows: 

1)  What does "home" mean to you? 

2)  Can you describe the feeling of "being at home"? 

3)  What comes to mind when you think of your childhood home? Is it one specific 

house or place? Or is it multiple places? What do you picture/see?  

4)  Where did you feel most at home when you were a kid? What were some of your 

favorite places to be? 

5)  Can you describe the different homes that you've lived in throughout your life?  

These questions were extremely helpful in giving me a sense of direction for my project. 

They worked extremely well for conducting interviews with both my mother and sister, though I 

occasionally worded some of the questions differently in the moment, based on how they each 

might have answered a previous question. However, in the interview with my grandmother I 

started to see the cracks appear in the straightforward script of my interview protocol. I found 

that I needed to switch strategies slightly and do a less formal interview with my grandmother – 

 26 

for example, I didn’t use my wireless 

clip-on microphone with her like I did 

with my sister and mother, I had her sit 

with my grandpa in her living room 

and interviewed them together with 

just a camera set up in the background. 

And I only ended up asking her the 

first question on the list, directly.  

Many of the topics posed by the other 

four questions were still covered with 

my grandmother during her interview 

even if I didn’t end up posing the exact 

questions, but it was much more 

conversational. I made these changes 

in consideration with her struggle with 

Alzheimer’s disease – I didn’t want her 

to be anxious or confused by the 

camera or technology, I didn’t want her 

to lose track of the conversation by 

Figure 5: from the top down, my sister Olivia, my 
mother, and my grandparents 

constantly switching interview questions, and I knew she would want my grandpa there with her 

to fill in the gaps of her stories and that it would in general help her feel more secure.  

 27 

I wanted to just sit with her, see what she remembered and wanted to tell me. I wanted to 

hear whatever she had to say, even if for the most part she sat quietly in her chair, looking to my 

grandpa to tell me the stories that she once knew by heart.  

And this, for my grandma, transitioned more naturally into the second section of the 

interview that I had designed where I planned to ask everyone to show me around their homes. 

My grandpa began walking around and showing me pictures and objects and the stories of 

different furniture in their house before I could even get my camera set up. For my sister and 

mother, I did have more traditional interview questions prepared, though I actually rarely used 

these prompts in the moment, instead relying on these ideas to guide any discussions we had 

while walking around the home. 

The interview questions were as follows:  

6)  Tell me about your current home -- how you’ve arranged the space, how you 

move through the space, feelings associated with certain spaces. We can get up 

and walk around if you want! 

7)  What areas in here do you spend the most time in? 

8)  Describe your most recent time coming home, walking through the front door – 

what did you see, feel, hear, touch, smell? 

9)  Is there an object or several objects in your home that have special meaning to 

you? What stories or memories do these objects bring to mind? How do these 

objects remind you of home? 

For my mother, I did specifically ask her about questions 7 and 8, but for my sister, she 

addressed those ideas without being asked. I loved how each person went room by room, telling 

stories, giving details, holding up each object, touching things without much prompting. I didn’t 

 28 

end up truly needing these questions to guide what I felt they were already doing – reflecting on 

the sensory, the material, the lived experience of the home.  

And then, after the second section of the interview, I usually had specific ideas or 

questions I wanted to address with each interviewee that weren’t included in the original 

interviews. For my sister Olivia, for example, I asked questions specifically about her work in 

interior design; for my mom I asked about her work with maps as an artist on Etsy; and for my 

grandmother I asked specifically about the story of the family sourdough bread. These three 

topics were topics that I had had in mind for each interviewee since I originally developed the 

idea for this project. Often, these ideas were referenced vaguely in the original interview, but I 

wanted to spend time with each person to really emphasize a specific theme and/or idea I saw 

emerging in their stories.  

And it’s this, this movement and adjustment to each person, to each story, to their needs 

in the moment that I didn’t feel was captured by the original description of the project in the IRB 

review, that isn’t named in the interview protocols – it is something felt, and lived, and 

embodied. The questions I posed to each of my family members were about their feelings, their 

memories, their sensory experiences – and I wanted the interview practice itself to be dictated by 

these same ideas, an interviewing practice led by the senses, by our embodied experiences of 

memory and story, our feelings in the moment.  

*** 

I’ve named this practice sensory interviewing – taking cues from Sara Pink’s (2015) 

sensory ethnography, phenomenological methodologies, and Esther Ohito’s (2021) conception of 

embodied reflexivity, I articulate sensory interviewing as an interviewing practice that seeks to 

explore the affordances of multimodal ways of gathering data that capture the lived, embodied, 

 29 

and storied experiences of space and place. In Pink’s (2015) book Doing sensory ethnography, 

she identifies the principles of sensory ethnography as that of perception, place, knowing, 

memory, and imagination – heavily drawing from theories of lived and embodied experience as 

deeply tied to the way we understand and interact with cultural and social knowledges. Pink 

articulates how, in most simple terms, “sensoriality is fundamental to how we learn about, 

understand and represent other people’s lives” (2015). It is through the senses that we perceive 

the world, create a sense of place, form knowledges, understand memory, and imagine new 

meanings.  

At several points during the book, Pink (2015) draws on phenomenological 

methodologies in their emphasis on the senses and the body as our “primary medium,” through 

which we perceive the world, as stated by phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty. “Our 

phenomenological experience,” Pink states, “is not of disjointed sensory sensations but is instead 

of a coherent multisensory world, where sounds, smells, tastes, lights, and touches amalgamate” 

(2015). This multisensory nature of human experience lends itself to the necessity of 

phenomenological methodologies, as identified by Eyles (1985) in Senses of place, where he 

articulates phenomenology as method is "an attempt to isolate and clarify that which we 

experience and how we experience it" (p. 33). I see sensory interviewing as an inherently 

phenomenological practice, a way of bringing our lived experience to the surface of our 

consciousness and emphasizing the value and importance of the senses as how we come to know 

and make meaning in the world.  

By emphasizing the relationships between phenomenology and ethnography, Pink’s 

emphasis on the sensory aspect of ethnography brings together the relationship between the 

individual lived experience and the larger social/cultural aspects that we are situated within. Pink 

 30 

specifically defines sensory ethnography as departing from “the classic observational approach” 

to instead argue for “a reflexive and experiential process through which academic and applied 

understanding, knowing and knowledge are produced” (2015). Pink attributes this “classic 

observational approach” as promoted by the work of Atkinson, Delamont and Housley (2007) 

which argues that more recent approaches to ethnography have “devalued systematic analysis of 

action and representations, while privileging rather vague ideas of experience, evocation and 

personal engagement” (2007, p. 35). Pink instead argues that an increased emphasis on 

“experience, evocation, and personal engagement,” is not vague, but rather strengthens the work 

of ethnography. Ethnography, as it relates to the study of cultures, allows researchers to articulate 

how narratives and practices are shared across groups of people, often through immersion into 

the cultural context itself. Similar methodologies such as autoethnography, which draws on 

personal experience to understand cultural experience, and life history research, which draws on 

individual or collective narratives as part of a life trajectory to better understand larger social and 

historical contexts over time, also emphasize the connection between experience and cultural 

knowledges.  

See this description of life history research for example:  

Life history research […] aims to unveil the rich interplay between personal experiences 
and broader social, cultural, and historical structures. By interweaving individual 
narratives with social constructs, life history research can reveal how macro-level 
phenomena affect micro-level experiences and vice versa (Stewart). 

This relationship between the small, daily practices and experiences and larger socio-

cultural theory is a crucial foundation in understanding how narratives are co-constructed over 

time and how patterns reveal meaning and have reverberative effects on our understanding of 

life, time, and complex systems of power. As I take cues from these larger methodological 

 31 

 
practices, I want to emphasize how reflexivity, embodiment and experiential knowledges bolster 

this understanding of our situatedness within larger contexts.  

This concept is what brings me to Esther Ohito's (2021) conception of embodied 

reflexivity as a methodological practice that “must be seen as a dialogue” with ourselves and 

with the social/cultural assumptions embedded in everything we do as researchers, taken in the 

form of “explicit and introspective analysis of [our] relationship to social constructs” that are 

relevant to the research topic. Ohito’s focus on embodied reflexivity more specifically 

emphasizes a researcher’s attunement “to her body in the present moment” as a way to give 

precedent to “the knowledge generated by our bodies” and the ways in which our positionalities 

as researchers are e/affected by our bodily experiences (2021). “Embodied reflexivity,” she 

states, “is about being wholly conscious of one’s own feelings and emotions in order to be fully 

immersed in the here and now” (Ohito, 2021).  

Ohito’s emphasis on “the knowledge generated by our bodies” in her conception of 

embodied reflexivity, directly reminds me of a crucial article by Ramírez and Zecena (2019) in 

the cultural rhetorics journal constellations, titled, "'The dirt under my mom’s fingernails': Queer 

retellings and migrant sensualities." In it, Ramírez and Zecena describe their specific theory of 

'rhetorics of the flesh' as "a strategic writing act rooted in the assumption that el cuerpo sabe, the 

body knows, and it is through the senses and embodied knowledge wherein one remembers and 

can retell stories" (2019, emphasis added).  

The body knows. 

And it’s this deep attunement, this bodily knowledge, that is so central to the 

methodological theory of sensory interviewing and how I, as the researcher, sought to center 

myself in the feelings and movements and senses of what was happening around me. As I asked 

 32 

my “participants” to consider their sensory 

experiences, as I attempted to capture part of their 

sensory lives through video recording, I also was in 

tune with my own sensory experiences and emotions 

– what it felt like to engage with their stories, what it 

felt like to be in their spaces with them; spaces that, 

to me, were also deeply familiar. These interviews 

were with three women I am extremely close to, 

whose experiences intersect with my own, and it is 

important to acknowledge this sense of intertwining 

in what it means to capture and reflect on the bodily 

experience of the home. 

*** 

At the coffee shop where my sister Olivia 

works as a part-time baker, I film her hands as they 

move expertly across the counter of the kitchen – 

reaching for the flour, or the spatula, or to add a 

Figure 6: my sister's hands, making 
scones; my mother's hands, painting; 
my grandmother's face just barely 
illuminated in the dark room 

splash of vanilla to the dough in the industrial-sized mixer. She doesn’t have a recipe, and she 

sings along to the radio as if she forgot I was there. 

I sit with my mother and film as she makes precise movements with her paint brush to 

make a perfect clean line on the painting of the map in front of her. I can tell she’s making a 

decision about what color to use for the next section in order to create the perfect balance.  

 33 

I ask my grandparents if I can come over and film us watching what our family calls “Big 

Pictures” – an old slide projector with over 50 years-worth of slides that was always one of our 

favorite family past times when I was a child. We turn off all of the lights in the sewing room 

once my grandpa sets up the projector, and I watch as the flickering light from each photo passes 

over my grandmother’s face. 

This, to me, is sensory interviewing. It is the lived experience of place, of home – the 

sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches of what it is to be in a place, and of what it is to 

experience the world around us. Sensory interviewing is where we are right now and the ways 

that often, where we are right now is tied so deeply to where we’ve been – where we come from.  

It is movement, it is sitting still. It’s the weather and the knickknacks on a shelf. It's the 

feeling in my body when I look at a certain picture on the wall, when my mother puts her hand 

on the table as she walks by, when my sister sits for hours playing the piano and the way her 

hands move while she’s baking, and how they look the same and different from my mother’s 

hands as she expertly moves her paint brush. It’s how my grandmother doesn’t bake anymore, 

doesn’t sew anymore, how quietly her hands sit in her lap as she looks at me and smiles.  

*** 

Steph Ceraso’s (2015) “A tale of two soundscapes,” describes “how the use of digital 

audio can tap into affordances that are simply not possible in strictly textual academic work.” 

Ceraso uses this medium of digital sound to create an experiential narrative that explores the one 

sensory aspect of what it is to be in a place as a ‘listening body’. This idea is further articulated 

in the introduction to Arola & Wysocki’s (2012) edited collection Composing (media) = 

composing (embodiment), where, in her discussion of McLuhan, Wysocki states, “technologies 

and media enable us to extend what we can do with our given sensory apparatus” (2012, p. 4). 

 34 

Media and technologies can serve as extensions of our bodies, and these relations allow for shifts 

and affects both ways – “our senses reflex and shift in response to these mediated engagements, 

and in further response we then modify our media toward our shifting ends” (Arola & Wysocki, 

2012, p. 4).  

There are deep affordances to the multimodality of the practice of sensory interviewing – 

how I am able to capture the sensory experience of the home (visuals, sound, movements) 

through video recording each individual’s experience of the things around them (touch, taste, 

smell). This process is extremely back and forth, shifting constantly to not only capture what is 

around me but also reflexively process my embodied experience and the embodied experiences 

of my family members. And so, when I go back to look at the footage, I don’t notice when the 

audio gets a little off, or when the video feed gets a little shaky as I follow my mother into the 

dining room or when I have to shift my camera to my other hand in order to take something that 

my grandma hands to me. Instead, I see how much there is, in each woman’s life, in their homes. 

How complex are their stories, how intricate their lives as they weave in and out with the stories 

of others, how they weave in and out with the stories of objects – family history, the memories of 

all the places they’ve lived, all the people they’ve met. 

Ohito (2021) discusses specifically how photographs and other “personal archives” can 

be used to provoke and evoke memory – which she specifically uses to explore her own grief 

after the sudden loss of her father. “All in all,” she says, “the wide spectrum of human emotions 

triggered by the time-traveling process of re-viewing my father’s likeness in family photographs 

produced periods of weeping that were punctuated by surprising moments of laughter” (Ohito, 

2021). She describes how these emotions were an important part of her grief, quoting Douglas 

Harper’s (2022) article, “Talking about pictures” which states how “’images evoke deeper 

 35 

elements of human consciousness [than] do words’ (p. 13).” For this project I heavily rely on the 

use of images and visual storytelling – not only in the chapters of the dissertation itself, but in the 

way I initially gathered data, asking each person to engage in looking at photographs, videos, and 

daily household objects with me in order to see how these things provoked memory and story. 

Multimodal methods, whether in engaging with each person’s stories through multimodal means, 

like with images and archives, or in the gathering of the data itself, as in the capturing of footage 

through video recording, offer complex and rewarding affordances in specifically thinking about 

the home as itself a phenomenon that is more than words. It is something spatial, something 

embodied, something concerned with the emotion of place and how, so often, our stories are tied 

to objects, places, and people that surround us in the everyday. 

*** 

My grandma tells me a story of 

the house she lived in as a little girl, her 

words seem to come to her more easily 

than they did when we spoke yesterday. 

I have the camera set up in the corner of 

my mom’s kitchen and my grandma and 

I sit close to each other at the kitchen 

table with a family history scrapbook in 

front of us. My mom had made the 

Figure 7: my grandmother and I, looking at a 
scrapbook 

scrapbook when I was in 8th grade as a part of a school family history project. Though it was a 

school project for me, I think she wanted an excuse to put together a visual history of our family 

– the stories and memories that might one day be lost to time. There are quoted stories from me, 

 36 

my parents, my grandparents; old black and white photos; family trees. And on the page 

dedicated to her “Alice Albright Tucker,” she sees the photo my mom had found of the house she 

grew up in Longview, Texas.  

“Do you remember it?” I ask.  

“Of course,” she says.  

When I get up a while later to check on the camera, I realized the memory card had 

become full at some point during the filming and had stopped recording. I had only captured 

about half of the stories she told me, as we looked at the scrapbook together.  

What does it mean to remember? 

*** 

While working on this project, I often reflected on Erin Anderson’s (2011) multimodal 

piece that I feel makes similar moves to what I want this project to do and to be. Her project is 

“devoted to the memory” of her grandmother, saying that “It is at once her life story and not a 

story at all. In a sense it represents the product of an intimate family collaboration and of the 

close journey we shared in collecting and preserving her oral history.” However, the interface for 

the project, Adobe Flash Player, is no longer supported by Adobe as of late 2020, leading to 

broken links and error messages when attempting to access the video content; and I can’t help 

but think of the sort of tragic irony behind the loss of accessing this content, and the unreliability 

of technology to serve as a perfect tool for capturing and archiving the stories we want or need to 

tell. She states in her introduction to the online archival article, “this project is not a product” but 

is rather “about process, and at its core it is also about you, about your encounter with it, and 

about your participation in the ongoing process of composing memory” (Anderson, 2011, 

emphasis original).  

 37 

The ongoing process of composing memory. Is a part of this process a failure of 

technology? A loss of something tangible? An inability to access what we once knew? For me, 

this was specifically poignant as I reflected on my own irony of my memory card running out of 

space as I was filming a story about my grandmother’s own experience of memory loss. The 

technological logistics of the process of videoing in general came with its issues with all three 

interviews – for example, I noticed a sort of hyper-awareness of the camera that doesn’t always 

allow for true authenticity. I think about how my mother insisted I never show her her own 

footage, not wanting to know what she looked like on film. Or, in my grandparent’s case, there 

was sometimes an un-awareness of the camera, moving in and out of the frame as a I hurriedly 

followed each of them around their home, oblivious to when my camera battery died, and I had 

to shift to using my old iPhone 8 camera to record shaky clips of my grandpa handing me more 

and more old family photographs.  

There was a vulnerability brought on by the video camera, and what I was asking all of 

my interview participants to do and engage with. It was their words, their stories, their homes, 

and I was asking them to share it with me, to capture it on film, to tell their stories with them.  

Alexandra Hidalgo’s (2017) discussion of the complexities of filming memoir identifies 

three processes within this practice: “remembering together,” “creating together,” and “editing 

together.” The process of filmmaking, according to Hidalgo, is an inherent group project, one 

that allows for a constellated effort of people, relationships, and potential conflicting memories 

as a part of the storytelling process. I’m so interested in how interconnected my own 

embodiment behind the camera became to the process of filming my family. And how, at the end 

of the day, they were my family – not just my ‘research participants,’ but rather people who were 

and are deeply tied to my own sense of identity. There is an embedded relationality in this 

 38 

process of engaging with my family’s homes and stories that not only shaped how this process 

was mediated by digital and multimodal ways of meaning-making, but what it meant for me, as a 

sister, daughter, granddaughter to begin to tell and retell these stories of my family’s lived 

experiences as so entangled with my own.  

*** 

There were stories I felt I knew by heart.  

Something already embedded within me, in my bones, after years of hearing the same 

ones, over and over – I asked them to once again share the words already stitched into the skin.   

Tell me the story of the chair.  

Tell me the story of the table.  

Tell me the story of the cabinet.  

You don’t know these stories, not yet. But I do. I hear them in my sister’s voice, my 

mother’s voice, my grandmother’s voice. I see them laid out before me, a pathway forward to… 

something just over the horizon, right on the edge, on the tip of my tongue.  

Home. 

*** 

Ramírez and Zecena (2019) describe the writing act they engage in through the stories 

and lives of their Latina migrant mothers and the embodied knowledges passed down through 

generations as a 'rhetorics of the flesh' poiesis. This poiesis they define as "a poetic and 

embodied way of knowing and being. It is a collision between poetry and rhetorics, and of bodies 

communicating in space" (Ramírez and Zecena, 2019). Not having heard the term ‘poiesis’ 

before, I initially assumed that it was related to poetry and how poetic expression and language 

can be used in conjunction with rhetorics to further theorize what it means to be and know. 

 39 

However, while poiesis and poetry share a root word – the Greek word poiein, “to make” – 

poiesis is best defined as “the process of emergence.” The bringing into being something that did 

not previously exist. Formation. Creation.  

It is more than poetry, it is an act of becoming.  

The stories of my grandmother, mother, and sister are a type of generational knowledge, a 

type of becoming, a poiesis that allows me to start to see patterns emerge – patterns in their 

language, in their stories, in the way their bodies move through space. These patterns create and 

form meaning as a rhetorical creation process of emergence through the small, repeated, daily 

actions of what it means to be a body in a space. 

In this dissertation I engaged in my own type of “strategic writing act” as described by 

Ramírez and Zecena – my own embodied experience colliding with the footage I collected, my 

memories, the blurry photographs on my phone, and what it felt like to write out these stories 

and put them in conversation with the intellectual and scholarly genealogy of the 

interdisciplinary scholarship of home and phenomenology and rhetorical, cultural, and feminist 

theory. I seek to blend of the creative – in both sense of the word, drawing on creative writing 

strategies of storytelling, poetry, and memoir, as well as creation in the way I allow patterns to 

bring meaning to the surface – and the critical in how I make theory from this creative work to 

draw conclusions for the field of rhetoric and writing in arguing for memory as scholarly, the 

personal as theoretical, and the everyday, mundane, forgotten things of our daily lives as 

rhetorically significant.  

I remember the first time I encountered the term “creative critical” scholarship, through 

Ames Hawkins’ book on love letters sent from their father to their mother years before the two 

divorced, and their father’s ultimate passing from complications related to AIDS. The book is 

 40 

genre-bending and ultimately brings to question where the line is between scholarly, critical 

work and creative writing and storytelling. As I further researched the term, I stumbled across a 

video “manifesto” for creative critical scholarship by Emily Orley and Katja Hilevaara, who 

argue: “We want to destabilize the boundaries between the critical and the creative, and in so 

doing enrich them both and discover a communal practice – one that relies on another (one 

another) for inspiration and energy, both critically and creatively.” They quote an idea from 

Karen Barad, who says that “it is through specific intra-actions that phenomena come to matter – 

in both senses of the world” to ultimately argue for this destabilization of boundaries, leading to 

the mantra they repeat multiple times throughout the video: boundaries do not sit still.  

In this dissertation, I attempt to take up this mantra as I flit between poetry and 

scholarship, block quotes and photographs, the stories and voices from my interviews and my 

own questions and reflections. I seek to take cues from a wide variety of scholarship as I attempt 

to situate myself and the stories I want to tell within the larger field of rhetoric and writing, to 

build off of the work and stories that came before me. Because the boundaries of what counts as 

research, the boundaries of what stories matter and are worth telling, the boundaries of a 

discipline – they do not sit still. The critical, the creative… they are connected, like you and I are 

connected. Like my mother, grandmother, and sister are connected. Allowing us to make 

something new. It is messy at times, but hopefully conveys the sense of the importance of the 

stories we might sometimes look past, the stories hidden in the little things in our daily lives.  

This is a rhetorics of the small.  

Taking cues, sensory interviewing, embodied storytelling, multimodal theory, 

phenomenology, relationality – these are calls for us to pay attention. This is my methodology. 

 41 

To look to the small things that might go unnoticed, the patterns that emerge when we’re able to 

bring them to the surface of our consciousness, our very being.  

The chair in the corner of the room, faded by the sunlight. The table by the window, with 

a crack through the center from the wood adjusting to new climates. The cabinet you pass by on 

your way to the kitchen, full of knickknacks and napkins.  

Are you paying attention?  

 42 

 
 
CHAPTER 3: THE CHAIR 

There's a big blue chair in the corner of 

the room that looks smaller than how I 

remember it as a child.  

It always used to sit next to the back 

door with a navy-blue leather ottoman at its feet. 

Grandma would read us books, us all piled 

around her, and I thought it was a chair meant 

for a king, a huge engulfing thing where one 

could stack numerous cousins on the arms, in 

the seat, in grandma's lap. Her voice trilled as 

she read; Berenstain Bears, Dr. Seuss. I can still 

hear it.  

When my grandparents moved across the 

Figure 8: The big blue chair – in Olivia's 
house (top), in Grandma's house (bottom) 
while my mother tries on her wedding dress 

state in 2019, the big blue chair was added to the massive spreadsheet my aunt made of all of the 

things to be claimed by the family before selling the rest. Over forty years' worth of items, small 

and large; and I suppose it was only right to downsize to a more reasonably sized chair for 

Grandma to sit in their new home. There were no more grandkids small enough to pile into it, 

and Grandma didn't read us books anymore.  

But we all wanted it. Every single one of the cousins that had piled into Grandma's lap 

since we were too small to remember added their name to the spreadsheet, staking their claim. As 

if the memory was calling us, carrying us, to hold, to keep, to continue. To share it with our own 

families, make something new.  

 43 

Grandpa put everyone's name in a hat, drawing out the name of one of us to hold onto 

this megalith, this monument of memory. And it was Olivia.  

And I thought to myself, it's perfect. Olivia – the interior designer, lover of chairs, 

something about it seemed right that she should be the keeper of the chair, the one to hold the 

memory for us as we all grow and change, that it might be a place to come back to.  

And as I walk through the fourth home she's lived in the three years she's been living in 

Wichita Falls, the blue chair remains.  

And it sits in the corner of the room. And it looks smaller than I remember.  

But it's 

perfect. Covered in 

throw pillows, faded 

by the sun.  

It's perfect.  

*** 

I think it's 

interesting that I don't 

have pictures of my 

grandma reading to 

us in the actual chair. 

Figure 9: Time Travel 

I automatically link 

the two: Grandma 

reading equals 

Grandma reading in 

From left to right: Grandma (middle) reading to me (right) and my 
siblings, Olivia (left), and Nathan (middle). Grandma (middle) reading to 
me (middle) and my cousins, Rachel (left) and Naomi (right). Grandpa 
(left) holding a baby doll, with a young Olivia (right) in a red Teletubbies 
costume. My brother, Nathan, as a baby, sitting with books and stuffed 
animal.  

 44 

the chair. But I don't have photographic evidence of it. Of course, that doesn't mean that it didn't 

happen, but I wonder how we know for sure.  

There is a word in memory studies in philosophy called autonoesis, defined as a self-

awareness of one's own existence in time.7 Autonoesis is used in memory studies to describe the 

phenomenon of a type of mental time-travel through the experience of episodic memory, through 

the act of recall. I'm interested in this dissonance between present, physical realities and 

knowledges, and the experience of shooting backwards through time, through memory, to arrive 

in a blurry, fluid world of half-baked images that you can't fully trust. They could easily be 

inspired from a photograph you saw when you were young, or a conflation of multiple different 

experiences, not adding up exactly to equal what you see now. The chair being smaller than how 

I remember it is a rather jarring sense of time-travel, as I mentally teleport to a sense of a 

different body, a smaller body. One whose brain is not developed to create true autobiographical 

memory, where sometimes it's like watching myself in 3rd person, a strange tint over my vision 

like I'm in a living photograph from the mid 1990s. And I wonder if my memory is created by 

others' stories, others' voices, that have become attached to my sense of self, in the same way I 

attach these memories to the objects. Did my mother tell me once that we would pile onto 

Grandma's big blue chair to read books? Did it become folklore, a familial legend with 

grandchildren piled eight high, the blue chair standing tall and proud, welcoming us in?  

Did it become bigger than it itself could hold? And with time, it became weathered, 

frayed, faded – the inevitability of change. It sits somewhere new, now, and I want to latch onto 

that feeling -- the feeling like the ground shifted slightly beneath my feet as I tried to reconcile 

7 Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Autonoesis. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/autonoesis  

 45 

 
my memories with the physical, material reality of my vision. My perceptions, past and present, 

met, crossed, converged into some new sense of reality. Where both are true at once, true in their 

contradictions and inconsistencies as we time travel through what it is to change. To grow up, to 

outgrow, and to figure out what it is to remember.  

*** 

My sister sits at an old piano, her back toward me in her newest house in Wichita Falls, 

Texas – a strange green oasis close to the Oklahoma border. She has a tattoo of a hand on the 

back of her arm – a drawing inspired by Michelangelo's Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel – 

and I liked her explanation for why it was just inspired by it instead of a true depiction. She 

wanted the hand to be a little more active, unlike Adam's original limpness, as if it had already 

been imbued with the gift of life, as if it were reaching.   

The piano is her roommate's, 

handed down from a grandmother, and it 

was the first thing she showed me when I 

walked through the door, out of the Texas 

heat. Unlike her last house, this newest 

move includes air conditioning that 

actually works, which we both breathe in 

as we walk inside, somehow already 

sweating from the few steps it took to 

walk from the car to the front door.  

Figure 10: Olivia, playing the piano 

The piano is a warm brown, the bench seat is upholstered with a faded striped fabric, and 

Olivia's hair is catching the sun from the huge front windows, making it look almost blonde. Her 

 46 

voice carries through the melody of the song she has pulled up on her phone, finding her way to 

the chords, and I can't help but remember when she could only play one song on the keyboard 

our parents got her for Christmas when she was ten. I didn't know she was relearning to play.  

Olivia moved to Wichita Falls in the summer of 2020, exactly one month before I moved 

to Michigan, in the middle of quarantining for COVID-19. I remember driving into town to help 

her move into her apartment and realizing that she and I had never lived in different cities from 

one another before. We both were truly striking out on our own for the first time in our lives, at 

the same time. Our poor mother, two-thirds an empty nester in one go.  

And I think she found a home there.  

It took a while, no doubt. I remember when the winter storm took out the power grid 

throughout the entire state of Texas, only a couple of months after she had moved, and my mom 

said that Olivia called my dad crying because she realized she was alone. She couldn't go 

anywhere, do anything. Olivia had never been much of a crier, had always been the more stoic of 

the two of us, unlike me who would cry at the drop of a hat. I think my dad had to physically 

stop himself from getting in his car during a blizzard to drive 3 hours to get to her. To be alone, 

in a dark apartment, miles away from the people that love you. She just wanted to go home.  

But now she sits at her roommate's grandmother's piano, and we're waiting for her friends 

to arrive for a Tuesday night get together, and there are brownies in the oven. The song she's 

singing is about home.  

I want a house with a crowded table 

And a place by the fire for everyone 

 47 

Let us take on the world while we're young and able 

And bring us back together when the day is done.8 

*** 

Olivia has always had a different way of moving through space, a different type of vision. 

To this day I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who sees the world the same way she does, with a 

type of clarity I could never seem to possess. She could always look at things and see their whole 

and move them into place like a puzzle. When we were children, we would play with Barbies, 

and the homemade doll house handed down from my mother was always immaculate, the 

furniture placed just-so. We would boss each other around over whose room was whose, and she 

would always seem to win even though I felt my status as the older sister should've held more 

weight. Still to this day if she tells me to do something I'll do it, some part of me trusting 

implicitly in what she's able to see.  

When she and I spoke about our memories of our various childhood homes, she talked 

about the floor plan of the house, about how the curtains were arranged, sights and sounds buried 

deep within the back of my mind. The sound of our brother's hot wheels in the hallway, the exact 

shade of green in the dining room we never used.  

I think of our house in Celina and I picture really the dining room, which is weird 
because we never spent time in there, but I picture the first room when you walk in the 
front door […] I picture the table and the color of that room, a brownish-greenish […] 
those are the things I see, the colors of our childhood home – the reds and the greens and 
the browns, and the fabric that was on her kitchen chairs that were striped.  

…Basically the space, I picture the space. And honestly, if I really thought through it, I 
could probably walk through in detail what every drawer held, where like, all this stuff is. 
I know what color the cabinets were, what this looked like, where Nathan sat, where the 
TV was, what Christmas tree went… Almost in great detail of where everything was 
kept. […] the fabrics, the colors, the space, the who sat, where, when we ate, like, 
because you we were consistent about it, right? 

8 Song title: Crowded House, by the Highwomen 

 48 

 
 
 
I totally can picture the space. I don't know if it's like, bigger in my head too, since I was 

a kid, but I'm like, I could draw the floor plan and, like, tell you where everything was and, like, 

what color was, the doors and the long hallway. The sound of the hallway… the sound of the hot 

wheels raising down the hallway… 

She paid attention.  

She knew how to cook when she was seven, just from watching our mother, when I still 

didn’t know how to turn on the stove. We would joke about her being a chef when she grew up, a 

ballerina, a CEO, a doctor, a spy. And so when she decided on her major in college, I was 

honestly surprised by her choice of interior design. I shouldn’t have been, it made sense when 

you looked at the whole picture, but I expected something more exciting, maybe – something 

that felt bigger, something where she could change the world with the wave of her hand. But then 

one evening I was home while we were in college, and she had just started her first classes and 

she started talking about chairs. And I was never able to get it out of my head how she talked 

about them – the history, the complexity to this everyday thing I take for granted.  

There was this one assignment, which she described to me as both her favorite and least 

favorite assignment from her entire college career that asked the students in her class to draw 

accurate depictions of historical chairs throughout the centuries. And that there was this moment 

where something clicked, when she realized that the point of the assignment wasn’t actually 

about chairs at all, in the sense that it was only about chairs – just chairs. She recently explained 

to me what she meant.  

She said, “We were looking at all of this furniture, and there was this chair from, I don’t 

even know what era, so long ago, that was really tiny because women wore hoop skirts so they 

 49 

 
would put their whole skirt over it and then perch.” She even sat up from the couch to 

demonstrate, her hands held up by her chest as if she were a bird about to take flight. She 

continued by referencing chairs from Ancient Egypt, Federal America, saying how they each 

functioned “based on the culture and the space.” 

She continued,  

And then moving into midcentury, you 
get more comfortable chairs based off of 
the ergonomics of the human body. And 
desk chairs that are comfortable for 
people for the first time. And even just a 
wing backed chair versus a comfortable 
sofa, a lounge sofa. Versus a La-Z-boy 
compared to le Corbusier’s chair that 
looks so uncomfortable until you sit in it, 
and it feels right. Based off of human 
proportions, based off of function, and 
style. 

Figure 11: The classic La-Z-boy versus le 
Corbusier's chair 

And essentially, for Olivia, to see these chairs laid out, in order, sprawling across the 

page, you could visually make connections, you could actually see how a chair could represent 

where we were in human history. How every famous chair has a story, some reason it was 

designed for some specific purpose, and how those needs and purposes changed over time. How 

we’ve evolved to understand the body, how our bodies move, how we use a space, and that 

we’ve been doing that since the beginning of time. And that with all of these purposes, all of 

these stories, and evolutions of what we need our chairs to do and be, their function now is the 

same as their function was thousands of years ago, to sit.  

They’re just chairs. But by being just chairs, we’re able to tap into a whole world of 

culture and history and bodies and how bodies function in space, and how interior design is 

 50 

 
meant to enter into this intersection and make intentional, conscious moves based on what is 

there, and what is needed and how, exactly, to make a change.  

*** 

*** 

From interview with Olivia, June 2023:  

When you’re doing a design project, the first thing that you should do is get to know how 
they function in the space. Not the goals of what this looks like, but what do you want 
your house to be like, thinking spatially.  

Is your living room where you sit? Or is that where you host? Is your bedroom where you 
spend your time? Do you have a long makeup routine, where you’ll want a vanity? Do 
you have kids? Do you have animals? Do you have family in town or only out of town? 
Because then that matters if you’ll maybe need a guest bedroom. Does your family cook 
together, or do you just cook? Do you want your kids to play in their rooms, or the living 
room? Do you have young kids and need to be able to see them when they’re outside? 
That’s where we would put a window, with a chair facing it.  

You have to know how they function; you have to know the goals of what they want their 
home life to be like.  

Then you ask, what’s your favorite color?” 

Within interior design studies there is a design principle born out of the industrial design 

and architecture movement of the 19th and 20th centuries, which states that "the shape of a 

building or object should primarily relate to its intended function or purpose." This design 

principle is titled, simply, Form Follows Function. The maxim, coined by Louis Sullivan in 1896, 

was a part of an article titled The tall office building artistically considered, which ended up 

being a fascinating article to read in consideration of the ideas in this dissertation.  

Known as the Father of Skyscrapers, Sullivan (1896) provides the following context from 

which this maxim is born:  

Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling 
workhorse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting 
clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where 

 51 

 
 
 
 
function does not change form does not change. The granite rocks, the ever-brooding 
hills, remain for ages; the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies in a twinkling.  

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and 
metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of 
the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form 
ever follows function. This is the law.9  
Life is recognizable in its expression. What a fascinating concept. We are shaped by what 

we do, and we shape the world based on the needs around us.  

I don't want to take Sullivan too out of context here, but his style of writing necessitates 

almost philosophical thought on what it is to be and do and to make – theories of things as a 

precursor to theories of design, and of art. Strangely enough, I don't know if I agree with the 

maxim itself. I find the "following" aspect of form and function to inspire a type of hierarchy 

between the two concepts that I doubt was originally intended. In my brief research on the 

history of the phrase, it seems as though it was eventually taken to mean a rejection of the 

ornamental as superfluous, as without 'function' – almost utilitarian in its emphasis on work and 

usefulness. The reason I believe this to be a misinterpretation of the original idea is that 

Sullivan's designs heavily feature ornamental elements – his designs speak to his belief in the 

value in beauty, in detail, in art. So what, then, does this mean for form following function? 

Sullivan's (1896) final paragraph of the article ends with a call for architects, as artists, to 

find in themselves an art of individual expression and to accept 'Nature,' as in the living, natural 

world around us, as that which "suggest[s] to us so much that is rhythmical, deep, and eternal in 

the vast art of architecture, something so deep, so true, that all the narrow formalities, hard-and-

fast rules, and strangling bonds of the schools cannot stifle it in us." The thesis, therefore, of the 

9 To be clear, his perception of this concept as "law," I assume means a type of "law of nature" which I find to be bit 
beyond the scope of what I'm talking about in this section. Does form always follow function in nature? This is a bit 
beyond me.  

 52 

 
 
article is not so much about form and function, but about what the outside world has to teach us 

as artists, as creators, and how this allows us to push past the boundaries put upon us by societal 

pressures. He asks readers to look to the things around us and gain a sense of their essences, or, 

the "essence of things," as he puts it – what we see when we peer beneath the surface.  

The relationship between form and function was central to the ideas in Olivia's discussion 

of interior design. She articulated function as an issue of how we live our lives, how we use 

space, our habitual behaviors. That there is something more to design than simply "liking how it 

looks," rather, "liking how it looks" is a way of enhancing these experiences, by enhancing 

aesthetic. Good design, for Olivia, takes all of it into consideration. In her words, "Function 

meeting beauty is where you find the sweet spot. I think we lose a lot of quality when we just 

look at beauty, and we lose a lot of quality when we just look at function." She is concerned with 

the how of home, thinking beyond mere appearance.  

For example, when we were talking about why chairs have been such a focus for her in 

thinking about larger ideas of interior design, she drew this parallel between chairs and the home 

itself:   

It's like a house. It tells you so much more about somebody, I think, than you realize. 
Because it's… ‘oh, I don't sit there, I just look at that one’ versus, ‘I sit in that one,’ you 
know? To me, it's really weird when we have chairs that we don't sit in, because why do 
you have a chair? Literally, the function of a chair is to sit in it. 

So I love chairs more than other types of furniture, I guess there's so much more going 
on. Like a sofa, realistically, they're all kind of the same. But a chair, it matters how high 
the seat is and how deep it is and how heavy it is. Does it stay there, or is it supposed to 
be able to move around? 

Me: You like the form and function. 

Olivia: Right? I like the form and the function. And to me, the big scale of that is the 
space of the home and the little scale is the chair.” 

 53 

 
 
 
 
Though "form" as a term can be in reference to beauty and external appearance, it is also defined 

as the shape and structure of a thing, the nature of a thing, a kind of thing, and a mold from 

which something is made. As a verb, it is to shape, to construct, to combine, to arrange, to come 

into existence. Function, on the other hand, is simply synonymized as 'purpose,' or rather, "the 

action for which a person or thing is specially fitted or used or for which a thing exists."10 With 

this definition in mind, it is easy to see how both Sullivan and Olivia find themselves enamored 

with function – a purpose that dictates why a thing exists. For Sullivan, this comes down to the 

very nature of life itself, that purpose is discoverable, accessible, if we look beneath the surface 

to see the truth that form can tell us about the function of a thing. For form ever follows function, 

this is the law. For Olivia, function is linked more directly to action – what we do, what things 

do. Function is concerned with life – the function of a home is to live in it, in the same way the 

function of the chair is to sit in it. Form, for Olivia is concerned with appearance, often beauty, 

with how things look to us, with how things look to others. But I'm interested in this deeper 

aspect of form – of how things are made, are shaped to be a certain way. 

And I think it's here, in this entanglement of form and function, where Olivia's theories of 

the home really start to take shape – the home as a site of living, of tangible objects that affect us 

while we affect them, and the people with whom we're with creating a mutual construction of 

memory, story, and what it is to matter.  

*** 

Me: What does "home" mean to you? 

10 Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Form. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/form  
Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Function. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. https://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/function  

 54 

 
 
Olivia: Home is where I live. It's where I sleep, it's where I eat. It's where I cook, where I 
go to the bathroom, it's where all of my stuff is. But I also think it's where I'm most free 
to be myself, have my rhythms and my routine. It's where I include people and make 
them welcome into my life. Like, I think someone doesn't really know you, like really, if 
they haven't been to your home.  

Home is where I relax, but in other ways it's also where I work (because you don't have to 
do chores at other people's houses).  

It's… it's where I live, that's how I would describe it. But living in your home includes all 
parts – you do everything about your life in your home in some aspect. Like, I live. I 
sleep, I eat, I drink, I work, I play, I rest, I hang out, I'm alone, I think, I don't think. It's 
where you're at your best and at you're worst, probably. It's a lot of things, it holds a lot. 
Physically and emotionally.  

[Interview with Olivia, June 2023] 

*** 

In phenomenological studies, there is a concept called ready-to-hand that allows for an 

entrance into the discussion of form and function as a phenomenological issue and is central to 

the idea of home as phenomena. Coined by Martin Heidegger in Being in Time, ready-to-hand 

refers to that which is in reach, the daily objects that serve their purpose in a way that makes 

them fade into the background of our perception. Ahmed elaborates on this concept, "the 

nearness of the hammer, the fact that it is available to me, is linked to its usefulness; it is near as 

it enables me to perform as specific kind of work. [This] is interesting to Heidegger, insofar as it 

is something to do with what the hammer 'is.'" (Ahmed, p. 47). I find ready-to-hand interesting in 

the same way Ahmed does, in analyzing Heidegger's example of the hammer – the nearness of 

objects and the purpose of objects are thereby linked, but most importantly this reveals how the 

concept of ready-to-hand is most chiefly concerned with the relationship between us and objects, 

and the function of the objects telling us something about the form of the objects – what the 

hammer is is linked to what the hammer does.  

 55 

 
 
 
 
The hammer as an example, in my opinion, is a bit overused in discussions of ready-to-

hand, though it makes sense as the simplest version of what Heidegger is focused on in this 

particular section of Being in Time – equipment. Thinking about tools, where their intrinsic 

function is to be useful, to be used, makes for an interesting discussion of the nature of function 

itself, and how it relates to our perception of that usefulness. But what if instead of the hammer, 

we looked at ready-to-hand through the lens of the chair? Though 'ready-to-hand' in this case 

might take a slightly more indirect meaning (would it be more like ready-to-sit?), I do think 

chairs symbolize the most important aspect of readiness-to-hand – they are within reach. This 

consideration of the relationship between proximity, nearness, and familiarity is a necessary 

discussion within the topic of home as a site of living, and the everyday objects that make up 

what it is to be at home. The chair is a pinnacle of this everydayness, while also representing the 

ready-to-hand concept beautifully – it's as if they wait to be sat in, to be used – built for our 

bodies, the chair makes a space for us to be, if we only move towards it with the intention of 

doing the thing for which it was made, and we take a seat. 

Ready-to-hand is often used in comparison with its counter idea – present-at-hand. When 

I first encountered this term, I was confused as to how "present-at" is in opposition with "ready-

to." I was, however, missing a crucial aspect of what distinguishes ready-to-hand as a concept. 

"Readiness-to-hand" involves transparency – when use becomes so routine that it falls out of our 

sight and awareness. To break this down further, let us look to Heidegger's actual words in 

describing "readiness-to-hand:"  

The less we just stare at the hammer-thing, and the more we seize hold of it and use it, the 
more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it 
encountered as that which it is—as equipment. The hammering itself uncovers the 
specific ‘manipulability’ of the hammer. The kind of Being which equipment possesses—
in which it manifests itself in its own right—we call ‘readiness-to-hand’. (Being and 
Time 15: 98) 

 56 

Though there is much to unpack in this quote, the key for me here is within the first 

sentence – the less we stare; the more we use. The function of the chair becomes more apparent 

when we actually use it, when we sit, and less when we take the time to fully examine the chair 

itself. This, then, is in contrast to present-at-hand, which comes into being often when the thing 

is broken, or when the chair is not able to perform its function. And suddenly, we notice. We 

become hyper aware of the thing's function and are forced to look intently at the thing in order to 

fix it, or, in the case of a chair that was meant to be comfortable, we perhaps buy a new one, 

hoping that it will better shape itself to our bodies.  

The best example of this idea I've heard did not come from an article about 'ready-to-

hand,' specifically but rather Olivia's descriptions to me over the years of what interior design 

can and should aim towards. The example she always gave was of a light switch – when you 

walk into an unfamiliar room that is dark and you fumble for the light. Is the switch where it 

'should' be? If it is, if your hands will go to where you think it should be, and you find it – the 

lights are on, you move on with your day – no real thought goes to the light switch, to what a 

light switch does, so that the room may be illuminated and you are able to see and do the things 

you are wanting to do. If the light switch is not where you think it should be, oh how aware we 

are of our need for light. Your hands skim the walls near the door thinking it must be up, down, 

further to the left. You eventually give up, walking across the room, hands outstretched, thinking 

it must be on the opposite wall somewhere. Once you eventually find it, wherever it ended up 

being seems positively ridiculous to you, why would it be there? The light switch, therefore, is 

present-at-hand – we are more aware now of where it is and what it does than we should be. 

According to Olivia, the design of the placement of the light switch should be thoughtless to the 

 57 

 
user, practically invisible. If you notice, you're doing it wrong. If you notice, it's not ready-to-

hand.  

I attribute this invisibility to more than just good design, rather, I see it as just as much an 

issue of familiarity and the act of inhabitance. Ahmed does interesting work in describing the 

process of moving homes – how her body moves through the rooms of the new house, as if to 

stretch herself to fit into every unfamiliar corner. She says, "In stretching myself out, moving 

homes for me is coming to inhabit spaces, coming to embody them, where my body and the 

rooms in which it gathers – sitting, sleeping, writing, acting as it does, in this room and that room 

– ceases to be distinct" (Ahmed, 2006, p. 11). It's this 'ceasing to be distinct' that I want to 

emphasize – what is the process over time in which space becomes routine? Ahmed discusses the 

feeling of walking blindfolded into a familiar vs unfamiliar space – "in a familiar room we have 

already extended ourselves" allowing us to reach out, touch the corner of a table and know which 

way we are facing. The question of orientation, therefore, is ultimately concerned with "how we 

come to 'feel at home'" (2006, p. 7). Familiarity and inhabitance are linked – Ahmed claims that 

familiarity is an effect of inhabitance, the effect of "reach[ing] out toward objects that are already 

within reach" (2006, p. 7). This 'already in reach' seems to put an emphasis not only on the 

concept of everyday objects, like the chair or the hammer, but also the way the spaces we are in 

can themselves influence what is proximal and near.  

As an example of this, I spoke with Olivia regarding the way in which design decisions 

are directly influenced by the ways people move through space, but also serve as a way to dictate 

this same movement. Or rather, in her words, "intentional choices can really affect what you do 

in a room." She gives the example of her and her roommate not having a TV in their living room. 

…not having a TV in a living room changes how you use your living room, right? My TV 
lives in my closet because I don't have a spot in here that I feel like, ‘oh, that's where the 

 58 

TV would go.’ And for me, when people come over, if there's a TV in the room, you turn 
the TV on. And if there's not, you have to choose to watch a movie, because you're like, 
‘Well, I gotta go get the TV.’ But these choices… if you don't have a big kitchen table, 
you're not going to eat in the kitchen, you will eat in the living room. And some of that is 
you choos[ing] houses that have these things, but the design of a home: where a light 
switch is, where outlets are, determines where you put lamps. So that determines where 
you sit to read, that is significant. 

Though the living room itself necessitated them pausing to consider if there was anywhere for a 

TV to go, they made an intentional choice to store the TV in the closet and bring it out only when 

they wanted to watch a movie with friends or catch up on a TV show. This simple change has 

directly affected the way that they think about watching TV, it's never just 'on' as background 

noise, as a default activity. This has shifted the way in which Olivia and her roommate function 

in the space itself, and I can't help but think about how many small instances of this back and 

forth – the space affecting people, people affecting space, the space affecting people – took place 

within this one example. The location of the object in question, the TV, and its proximity to the 

living space, determined the human response to and interactions with this object. However, the 

initial setup of the space was what led them to the decision to locate the object in that particular 

way. Therefore, I would argue that the TV in this instance falls more under the category of 

present-at-hand rather than ready-to-hand, as it is located in such a way as to be farther away 

from the space where it is typically used, creating the need for intentional decisions leading to its 

use. This lack of 'default' as Olivia put it, of picking up the remote to turn on the TV without 

thought, creates a hyper-awareness of what the TV is for, its function. 

Therefore, this back and forth of shaping and being shaped by is key to understanding 

how form and function are perhaps meant to be understood together in tandem – to the point 

where I wonder if the 'ever' in form ever following function implies an almost cyclical 

relationship between the two terms, instead of a hierarchical perception of form ever trailing 

 59 

 
behind the superior function. Ahmed (2006) articulates this back and forth, "the actions 

performed on the object (as well as with the object) shape the object. The object in turn affects 

what we do…" (p. 43). Action to object, object to action. It implies a series of complex 

relationships between space, objects, bodies, actions/interactions, and the intentionality of human 

choice (or consciousness, as it is often referred to in phenomenology) and the way that 

encounters between these things leave impressions on the others.  

A chair is a chair because you sit in it, a chair is a chair when you sit in it. A chair is 

shaped, sometimes literally, to your body, to the action of sitting. The way the cushion is 

indented on your favorite chair, tailored to the way you sit, and yet, it is your favorite chair for a 

reason – some form of extra comfort that it brings, or even where it is located, allowing you the 

perfect view out the window. This affected you sitting there in the first place, often enough for 

you to leave an impression. In one example, Ahmed (2006) uses tables to introduce this same 

idea – "what we do with the table, or what the table allows us to do, is essential to the table. […] 

Doing things 'at' the table is what makes the table what it is and not some other thing" (p. 45). 

This idea rang in my mind as similar to something Olivia said in reference to how it is that she 

remembers our childhood homes.  

All of the memories attached to all of the homes she's lived in are, she says "more people-

based than they are house-based." Even though, Olivia says, space has such influence, "it's way 

more about what you do in the space, how you use the space. What it sounds like, what it's full 

of." 

She says: 

The memory of the table is important but that's because of what we did at the table – it's 
not about the table. It [the table] is literally meaningless. Unless you're talking about this 
crazy piece of art or something really special because it's special – things are holding 

 60 

meaning because they hold meaning, not because they are a thing. And even home is 
doing that -- home vs house.  

She gestured when saying this last line as if to indicate the commonality of the phrase – 

house vs home. Like she was acknowledging the cliché baked into the discussion of home as a 

topic – that a house does not equal a home, that a 'home' means something more. And what 

Olivia seems to indicate here that this more-ness is about what we do in the home, what we do at 

the table. We give the things their meaning by using them, by existing with them, and sometimes 

by the simple act of giving them meaning because we say they do. A home has meaning because 

we lived there – we lived there, together. It's interesting then, that Ahmed (2006) continues her 

discussion of the table to say that "the people who are 'at' the table are also part of what makes 

the table itself," implying the importance of the 'who' in addition to the 'what' (p. 45). What are 

the people doing at the table, what are they doing with each other? What kinds of interactions 

between people are shaped by the shape of the table, and how do these interactions, in turn, 

shape the table? I'm thinking about the scratches on the surface, stains, pen marks, evidence of 

life. The impressions that we leave and are left on the spaces and objects around us tell a story.  

To quote Ahmed (again):  

This table, you might say, has a story. What a story it could tell. What we need to recall is 
how the  'thisnesss' of this table does not, as it were, belong to it: what is particular about 
this table, what we can tell through its biography, is also what allows us to tell a larger 
story: a story not only of 'things' changing hands, but of how things come to matter by 
taking shape through and in the labor of others. (2006, p. 45) 

I'm interested in this larger story – how things come to matter by taking shape through 

and in the labor of others. So often are the histories, memories, and stories that come to matter 

for us in objects a result of the labor, care, and effort put into either the making or upkeep of the 

objects, or the labor done in, around, and with the objects. I think about my Grandma's old blue 

chair, that now sits in Olivia's newest house. I think about how she would sit with us and read. I 

 61 

 
 
think about how her story matters, I think about how the chair being passed down – finding a 

new home, how these histories matter. I think it matters because of the photographs I have of us 

sitting in it – playing, reading – how it triggers memory in me, how it triggers memory in Olivia. 

And we share that, together.  

***  

"So the story of the chair is… Grandma's house is home, right?" 

She turns away from me to look at the chair in the corner. "And it's a big chair, so we 

could all snuggle up in it – all the grandkids could kind of pile around. And she would read us a 

book. Or whenever we would watch a movie or do Big Pictures on the projector at Grandkids 

camp, or just with family, everyone fought over this chair. So then when Grandma and Grandpa 

were moving and downsizing, there was the list of things they were going to get rid of – the list 

of things they were going to sell or give away. And this made it on the list, which was a shock to 

me. It blows me away. But it's because Grandma wanted a recliner."  

"So, it came time, and the whole thing with the spreadsheet was that you put your name 

on the stuff want and then whoever put it there gets it. And every single grandkid put their name 

next to this chair. And so it was either raffle style or choose a number between 1 and 10, I don't 

remember, but I won the chair.  

"And every person that sits in it is like, 'where did you get this chair? This chair is 

awesome.' And it's my grandma chair. And I plan on keeping it forever.  

"It's kind of gross now, and so faded on one arm, but it's also still really comfortable. And 

a great place to like, have a cup of coffee there…" she points. "Snuggle up there, while the sun 

comes in the window in the morning."  

I can picture it.  

 62 

"And the memory… just, all of it. And I feel victorious, like I won the chair – I win, I'm 

the best grandkid." She holds up her arms in victory, and I laugh.  

"That's how it feels," she explains. "Even though I know it wasn't a choice, it was a raffle. 

But it feels really good." 

***  

Olivia says home is a breath, like the deep breath she takes as she walks through the 

threshold.  

Olivia says home is kicking off your shoes when you walk through the door.  

Olivia says home is meant to be shared, meant to be welcoming, meant to be lived in. She 

says she hopes that she would still "invite people to my home even if it didn't look the way I 

wanted it to… It doesn't always have to be put together." 

*** 

To go back to Sullivan and his 1896 article that sparked the industrial motto of form ever 

following function, back to his argument for the need for 'tall office buildings' before the term 

skyscrapers ever was coined, the final line seems to be an argument for why this work matters – 

why the work of the architect might be something that lasts, how we push towards "an art that 

will live." And why will this art be an art that lives? Sullivan gives an answer – "because it will 

be of the people, for the people, and by the people."  

It's about relationships – between people and stories, actions, interactions, and what it is 

to live and be with others. There is complexity in the relationships between people, and the way 

that these relationships are shaped by the space in which we are, and how we in turn shape those 

spaces. The objects around us show evidence of the impressions we leave, of how our bodies 

intersect with these tangible things. And that through these impressions, through these 

 63 

relationships, with others, with space, with objects, we can start to see how stories and memories 

are wonderfully entangled with the tangible.  

*** 

Did you know that it matters how heavy a chair is? The weight dictates how the chair is 

used, its size, it's shape – it dictates if the chair is meant to be moved. The portable versus the 

permanent. The portable chair - ready to be brought out at a moment's notice, ready to be picked 

up or brought out when the need arises, or even the chair around a table, always ready to 

rearranged, ready to welcome someone in; versus the permanent chair - the chair planted in the 

corner, meant to last, meant to stay, meant to always be there for you to fall into after a long day, 

always familiar.  

When Olivia told me this, it's like something clicked – my understanding of why form 

and function are so endlessly tied. And for me, it always came back to the Grandma chair.  

Olivia: It's a comfy chair that stays where it is. You can't move it, it's hard to get in and 
out of rooms, for sure. But you can sit two people in it. And you stay for a long time, you 
talk in that chair. 

Me: And when we were little that's where Grandma read to us.  

Olivia: That's where Grandma read to us. So it matters. 

Me: Because we could all fit.  

Olivia: Because we could all fit.  

 64 

 
 
 
 
 
 
CHAPTER 4: THE TABLE 

The table was born in East Texas, deep in the green woods of the small town of 

Gladewater, where my mother spent her childhood roaming through the forest, behind the barn 

where the blackberry bushes once tore at my arms as a child, next to the chicken coup, by the fire 

pit where we would sit for hours, watching the smoke go up towards the stars. The trees were tall 

and thin, and the leaves would crunch under your feet as you walked back behind the garage, 

past the tree swing, past the zinnias and tomatoes in the garden, towards the workshop where my 

grandfather turned these trees into tables.  

My mother had requested the biggest 

table she could get, one that would fit as many 

people around it as she wanted – one that 

would fill the empty space of the dining room 

at the entrance to our house in Celina, Texas 

that we never used. And so my grandpa planed 

and sanded the table into perfection, just 

before my mom took hammers and chains to 

beat dents into the surface for a more 

distressed look, as was popular at the time – 

my grandfather looked on in horror. But she 

wanted it to look lived in, like it had already 

lived a full life before we took it home.  

She built it tall enough to 

Figure 12: The table in my grandpa's 
workshop 

accommodate my dad's 6'4" frame that couldn't usually fit his knees under most tables. She built 

 65 

it wide enough so that, in her words, "you could fit a whole bunch of food in the middle, and still 

have enough space for your plate." 

She built it to fit, to fill, to stay.  

And it did.  

I remember crafts, I remember birthday parties, I remember long late-night talks with my 

dad. I remember growing and changing and moving in and around this massive piece of my 

mother's childhood home that she brought home to us, made it ours.  

And then I remember leaving.  

We packed and sold and cried – at least my mother did – yet I remember being ecstatic, a 

feeling like being set free, unleashed into a world that was different and new. The house was 

empty, and I remember my mom looking back with a pain that I didn't understand, not yet. I 

remember only looking forward.  

The table, meanwhile, went to live back with my grandparents, in the same workshop 

where it was made. And there it sat for three years, waiting.  

And waiting.  

While we had other tables, other stories, other surfaces that housed the crafts and the 

parties and the long late-night talks with my dad.  

But it knew, because my mother knew, that we would always always be back.  

And now it sits here in Lubbock, Texas, with a crack through its center from the warping 

of East Texas wood in a West Texas climate. And yet it fits in this house just like it did in the 

carousel of rent houses we lived in before my parents bought this one – it fits like it was built for 

the space. The scratches on the surface are familiar, like a map of what we did, where we've 

 66 

been, who we've brought in to sit around the table with us – holding us now just as it held us 

then, with just a different view through the window.  

*** 

Is place in our bones?  

In forensic science and anthropology, studies have revealed that the isotopic composition 

in skeletal material can reveal "the geographic region that an animal or human inhabited" 

throughout different stages of an organism's life – our movements, our birthplace.11 We can look 

back throughout history and learn about the movements and changes of groups of people, we can 

trace living things back to what they ate and where they lived.  

So, yes. In a true, embodied sense, where we are from, our movements and migrations are 

a part of our material make-up – our bones are like maps of where we’ve been and where we are, 

logging ‘place’ in our bodies.  

But does place also do more than that? Does it live inside us through the stories we tell? 

Do we carry it with us in memory, in the way your stomach feels when you drive by the old 

house you used to live in? Do we feel it in our bones, this knowledge, this memory of place? Is it 

what causes this call to return, in the same way we sometimes feel the call to leave in the first 

place?    

*** 

Me: What does "home" mean to you? 

Mom: That is a big one. So home is… is just where you live. Like a physical place. But I 
suppose it's really more than that, because it's where you hopefully feel safe, and you're 
with people that you love and love you. And you make memories. And you perform the 
functions of life – eating, sleeping, bathing, but you also laugh and grow and become 
who you are.  

11 Beard BL, Johnson CM. Strontium isotope composition of skeletal material can determine the birth place and 
geographic mobility of humans and animals. J Forensic Sci. 2000 Sep;45(5):1049-61. PMID: 11005180. 

 67 

 
 
[Interview with my mother, June 2023] 

*** 

Gladewater, Texas 

My mother was born in Houston, Texas on July 15th, 1970. Her father had a job with 

Case, an agricultural machinery company, and they 

moved several times in the first four years of my 

mother's life, once in Memphis, Tennessee where her 

little brother was born, until they finally settled in 

Gladewater, Texas on a street called Iris Drive.  

And it was in this house that she lived until 

she moved away for college at 18, and where her 

parents, my grandparents, stayed until just a few years 

ago when they moved to Lubbock to be closer to my 

mother. It's this house that I remember from my 

childhood too – the trees, the barn, the ivy-covered 

walls leading to the big back porch.  

Figure 13: My mother in her 
childhood kitchen, my mother at her 
desk in her room 

And as we sat, far away from that childhood home, I asked her to remember how it felt to 

be in that place – where she liked to be when she was growing up – her favorite place, her 

comfort place. I asked her what she saw – what did she picture when she pictured that house, 

what came to mind? And her answer, somehow, always came back to tables.  

Me: Tell me about your childhood home.  

Mom: I was there from age four, until I went off to college. So I count that as my whole 
life because that's what I remember. And I'm grateful that we lived in one place for all of 
that time. Because yeah, it you truly make it your own. I mean, my family, we lived out 
in the country. We had a garden. We had animals, dogs, cats, chickens, a cow. Lots of 

 68 

 
 
things. We had land so it was more than just a home on a city lot. It was larger. And it was 
a lot of work for my parents, I know to maintain all of that. But it was kind of an idyllic 
place to grow up as a kid. 

Me: What do you picture? What do you see?  

Mom: Probably the kitchen table. Like within the home, the kitchen table. We always had 
dinner as a family around the table. And so even if we had been playing outside all day or 
off at school or work, we would try to all be home and have dinner together around the 
table. 

Me: What was your favorite place to be? 

Mom: In my room, I'm an introvert. And I was the only girl in our family so I spent a lot 
of time at my desk in my room and I would draw or paint. I had no problem being by 
myself. I would also play with my brothers outside and with neighborhood kids. But 
yeah, within the home, probably my room and then just probably in the kitchen with my 
mom would be the other spot. 

Like up on the counter. Yeah, I had like a spot I would sit on the kitchen counter. Unless 
she had me doing something. Chop this or do that. 
What did she see? The kitchen table. Her favorite place to be? Her room, but not just in 

her room… at her desk, where she would draw and paint and craft for hours on end. And she 

loved being in the kitchen with her mother, sitting up 

on the surface of the kitchen counter, or being given 

task after task. And isn't a kitchen counter its own kind 

of table? A surface in which we do things, make 

things, move in and around.  

For as long as I can remember my 

grandparents have had the same table – one that could 

Figure 14: My mother and father at the 
table on my mother’s 25th birthday, 
with zinnias from the garden as a 
center piece 

be shortened or lengthened with leaves depending on how many people needed to be seated. I 

remember when one of the leaves went missing at some point, and my grandpa had to make a 

custom replacement to fit perfectly into place. Growing up, the table would always be at its 

longest in order to accommodate the numerous grandkids and aunts and uncles, but I imagine 

 69 

 
 
 
 
 
when my mother was a child, it was probably much smaller. There are numerous pictures over 

the years at the table, of the grandkids, of birthday parties, holidays. There was always fresh 

sweet tea, the room was alight with the huge windows on three of the four walls, with red and 

blue stained-glass pieces hanging from each one.  

I knew the table itself was old, as most things were in my grandparents' house growing 

up, full of heirlooms and antiques, but when I was talking with my grandpa about this project as 

we walked through their new home in Lubbock, we stopped at the old cabinet in the kitchen 

which my mom had always called 'Grandma's cabinet.' I had always assumed this meant that it 

had belonged to her grandmother, but my grandpa corrected me to tell me that it had belonged to 

his grandmother. Then he pointed at the table in the other room, the one I grew up with, the one 

my mother grew up with, and said, "it went with that table. That was her kitchen table, and this 

was her kitchen cabinet." My mom and I later tried to do the math, and though we don't know 

when the table was originally bought or made, we can say with certainty that it is at least 100 

years old, if not 150. Imagine the places it has been, the things it has seen – even before it sat for 

so many years in Gladewater before it moved all the way across the state to now sit in Lubbock.  

Lubbock, Texas  

My mother moved to Lubbock for the first time in the late 80s for her freshman year of 

college. My dad was the first boy she met on campus, and she always said she knew immediately 

that he was the one, even if it took a little longer for him to come to the same conclusion. She 

said she didn't exactly want to move 500 miles away from home – it was 500 miles exactly, she 

checked – from the driveway of her parent's house to the dorms. She knew the route by heart, 

which gas stations had the best prices, what shortcuts to take. And when she arrived that first 

 70 

semester to move into the dorms, her mother helped her decorate to feel more at home, even 

going so far as to sew pillows so that everything would match.  

Moving from this family home into half of a dorm room… and of course my precious 
mom, we decorated – she sewed pillows and everything matched and it was just… we 
made the most of it. But yes, leaving home and starting somewhere new, that was a big 
deal. And I had just turned 18 when I did that. […] I don't even really know how I did 
that, emotionally. It was pretty scary because I didn't know anyone. But yeah, I do 
remember setting up that space and making it a little cute and organized. In college, you 
know, you go out and you go to class and you meet people but then you still have that 
space to come back to at the end of the day where you feel comfortable. 

[Interview with my mom, June 2023] 

She said the first time she 

visited Texas Tech University she 

knew it was where she had to be, 

there was just something about 

Lubbock, about the campus – the 

Spanish architecture, the spring 

winds, the crystal-clear blue sky 

that only seems to happen in the 

desert. And, it was the school that 

Figure 15: My mother in her dorm room in Lubbock, 
Texas 

had the best program for what she wanted to do – graphic design.  

My parents were both art majors, but my mother never felt like she truly fit in with the 

other art students – she wasn’t ‘artsy’ enough. They were all more like my dad with big emotions 

and abstract thoughts that spewed themselves onto the canvas – or the ones with a talent for 

hyperrealism, bringing our known world to life through drawing or paint or sculpture. She 

always felt stuck in between, which is why the graphic design concentration always stood out to 

her and fit so well. As a child she would sit for hours in her room with cut paper and put together 

 71 

 
landscapes and pictures and drawings, but all with a 

bright graphic style – bold shapes with strong lines.  

There's a term I recently learned about that 

could work as an accurate description of her style, 

'flat design' – described as a design style that "uses 

simple, two-dimensional elements and bright 

colors."12 It is a more recent term, likely not one 

discussed in her graphic design classes in college, 

as it is often used to refer to user interface design, 

popularized originally in responsive web design. 

But I am fascinated with the term 'flat' in this 

context – such a strange, almost negative 

connotation to the word, and yet here it is used to 

Figure 16: My mother, approximately 
10 years old, putting on an art show 

describe bold, colorful art – 'flat' as in two-dimensional, as in a level surface, monotone in its 

depth. Though the design style is minimalistic, it is not true minimalism, but rather emphasizes a 

simplicity in its lack of 3-D elements. Flat design is also "often contrasted to the skeuomorphic 

style that gives the illusion of three dimensions through copying real-life properties."  

Skeuomorphism was another new term for me, referring to a trend in digital design that 

serves as a callback to three-dimensional real-world items in digital spaces, like 'sticky notes' on 

your laptop screen designed to look like paper. The term can of course also be in reference to 

other types of call backs in design – light bulbs designed to look like candles, etc. But I think the 

12 Interaction Design Foundation. (n.d.) Flat Design. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/flat-
design?srsltid=AfmBOooznE_Tdu64eTBO-bF6wLNvrOpfFk1u10WOFWtWyIRJyR5YLf9m  

 72 

 
important part of putting flat design and skeuomorphism in opposition is what it reveals about 

the nature of abstraction, about how art, design, and digital spaces all together deal with how 

humans recognize and experience the things in front of them – how we make meaning. 

Skeuomorphism relies on memory and literal comparison between what is known and what is 

new, even if the thing that is 'known' is derivative in its cues toward the familiar. Flat design, by 

contrast, simplifies and abstracts, allowing for something that emphasizes color and visual 

appeal. From what I've seen, the design world has pretty unanimously agreed that a middle 

ground between the two is likely best, but I'm still stuck on the word flat – I'm drawn to its 

simplicity. 

A flat surface, a flat landscape – a plane, a page, a table.  

I think there’s something interesting to the art of turning the 3-D to 2-D, and what this 

does to us as humans making sense of the world.  

*** 

One summer in college, as my mother flew home from Lubbock (a rare occasion that she 

would fly) she found herself staring down at the flat, West Texas landscape. She was drawn to 

the lines, the shapes 

formed by fields and crops 

and roads. This birds-eye-

view allowed for a new 

perspective, something 

zoomed out at a large scale 

– with shapes you wouldn't 

be able to see from the 

Figure 17: a plateau, a tree stump, a hurricane, a snail 

 73 

ground. And she thought about how a similar phenomenon occurs when you look at something in 

a microscope, a new perspective, a zoomed in lens, a small scale – new shapes. Sometimes, these 

small-scale and large-scale versions of things can even look like each other – like atoms 

mirroring the planets in the solar system – the shapes of a huge plateau looked like the shapes of 

a cut-off tree stump. The swirls of a huge storm looked like the swirls of a tiny snail. 

This, she always said, was the only 'original art idea' she ever had in college, though she 

didn't know exactly what to do with it once she had it. I remember being struck by this idea with 

her when she first told me this story – the idea of the big things being like the small things, and 

vice versa. A testament to scale, the changeability of size and our perception of it.  

And it’s only within recent years that I feel we’re starting to see this idea come to life for 

my mother, over 30 years since that plane ride, since she looked at the world and saw something 

more, patterns and meaning and art.  

*** 

My mother moved to Lubbock for the second time in 2014, this time with her family in 

tow and it wasn't even a full year later before she began her Etsy shop. We didn't know what it 

would turn into then, how her business would explode 5 years later during the COVID-19 

pandemic. Her shop was, at the beginning, scattered – no clear theme, other than her colorful 

style that permeated the painting and sewing projects she sold on the website. The important 

factor at the time was not the content, but the fact that it existed at all. She made the decision to 

be an artist, to call herself one for the first time in her life. She just wanted to make things, to 

paint – for it to be her job, her calling, her identity.  

But what to paint?  

 74 

It was like a revelation, maps as the subject 

matter. Something clicked. In her words, "the first 

time I ever drew a map and saw it as an abstraction of 

something… where the roads crisscross, they create 

shapes in between." She held up her arms as an 

intersection to demonstrate, before continuing, "I 

basically switched positive and negative space, so I 

see the spaces in between the roads [… as] positive 

space, instead of the roads. Does that make sense?" 

Figure 18: My mom's map of Lubbock, 
Texas. Titled, “Dirt and Big Sky” 

I said it did, but I also had seen her maps before. I liked her description though, of 

switching positive and negative space – the abstraction of space, how shapes revealed themselves 

to her in the relationships between land and human being’s impact on it – the roads we build, the 

cities that pop up in the desert, or by a river, or on the coast of the ocean.  

She sees the lines. The 3-D becomes 2-D, the big becomes the small. The world and our 

place in it become abstracted and simplified, scaled down onto the page yet representing 

something larger.  

A city like Lubbock becomes captured on the page – its roads, its curves, the sprawling 

farms outside of town. Where are you within the shapes? Where am I? I can pinpoint my family 

home, all the houses I lived in with roommates during undergrad, my favorite coffee shop, the 

park where I would walk when I was sad. The shapes turn into something I know – how my body 

moved in and around with these lines as roads, these shapes as houses and neighborhoods and 

gardens and shopping centers.  

 75 

The patterns of the land start to come together into something recognizable, the 

abstraction that only becomes grounded once we know where we are, where someone else is, a 

path from point a to point b. 

*** 

The first time I ever wrote about my mom’s maps, I began with the phrase: "My mother 

has always loved color. She sees in bright shapes and strong lines. She is abstract. She is 

practical." 

I never explained what I meant… I don’t think I knew what I meant.  

I clearly saw these concepts of abstract and practical at odds with each other – my mother 

a representation of two competing ideas that led her to her ‘maps as art’ business – the 

abstraction of art, the practicality of maps as tools. And it felt true, how she could be both of 

these things – a graphic design major through and through, art in the world, rather than separated 

from it.  

But as I think of home, my mom’s maps, her story, I think it goes deeper than that – the 

way she thinks in both abstraction and practicality, and how it is this fact that ties her and I 

together and is what, however rarely, puts us at odds.  

The term ‘abstract’ does interesting things – it can refer to a summary of something (an 

abstract of an article), a theory of something (abstract ideas like love and beauty), or a separation 

of an idea from its physical form – a focus on the intrinsic nature of a thing, something 

simplified or broken down to get at the core of what it is. This simplicity requires effort, 

however, on the creator, on the audience. By that I mean that abstraction asks us to look deeper, 

to make meaning out of the version we have, and how it speaks to something larger, something 

familiar that we can just start to feel on the tip of our tongue. Practicality, on the other hand, is 

 76 

not concerned with the theoretical but rather what is here – the actions and practices that ground 

us in the world – usable, feasible, realistic.  

Maps are a great example of both of these principles at work at the same time – they are 

both abstract in their representational quality, and practical in their use in the world. How then 

can this same logic be applied to my mother herself? What does it mean to be both abstract and 

practical? To see the world and its meaning, what it could mean, to look beyond the surface, 

while still staying very much grounded in the world – in tune with the realities, and severities of 

life here on earth. She has always been an anxious person, someone focused on security – 

wanting to be financially responsible, always focused on the day-to-day. This is why she didn’t 

start her art business until she was in her 40s, because it was never practical to do so. This is 

why, when she did start her business, half of her focus is on just that… the business side of 

things. I look at her work and only want to see the symbolism, the meaning, the artistic 

implications of the maps. And though she does love those things, she is also focused on the 

simple fact that people also just like to buy them. The business needs to be sustainable.  

She tells this one story that always stuck with me, that for me, represents this conflicting 

nature of abstract and practical. It was while she was in college, where she describes the 

expectations for art students – the work has to be about self-expression, commentary about the 

world; something deeper, something that pushes at the boundaries of what it means to create.  

And my mom decided to paint something that matched her sofa.  

She says: 

In my watercolor painting class, I remember this vividly, I did this set of two or three 
paintings, and they were just abstract… like different shapes and colors and stuff. And I 
painted it to match my college apartment – the furniture and colors that were already 
there. But you don't dare do that in art school. So, when I had my critique from my 
professor – when you have to put up all the things you've painted that semester – I just 
completely made up a story about this piece. Because I couldn't tell him I painted it to 

 77 

match my sofa. Like, that's so wrong in the art world. But I… I kind of started down this 
boloney description. And he was standing there, and he was like, ‘Yes, I see… It's about 
movement… and change.’ And I was like, ‘Yes, exactly.’ 

…But yeah, I really did pick the colors that I just liked and that would look good in my 
apartment. 

This for her, is the perfect example of this conflict, this balance between something just 

simply not having a deeper meaning, it was just supposed to be pretty, it was just supposed to 

make her new apartment look good – make it feel more like home. But she made something up 

for her professor, who ‘saw’ what she was talking about, even though it wasn’t true. And I can’t 

help but think that there might be something to this idea – are things created for simple reasons 

somehow less valuable? Or is there actually deeper meaning in the simple things, even if we’re 

not consciously aware of it?  

Because I asked her if she ever wonders if maybe, somehow, subconsciously, the 

paintings were about movement and change. She had just moved apartments, and our 

subconsciousness is a pretty powerful force in shaping how we see things around us. What if it 

was actually about change?  

She shrugged in response to this question, as if to give me the point, but I didn’t get the 

sense she actually believed it.  

But then she told a story about how something similar happened with my dad in school, 

what we, to this day, call his ‘blue period.’ His professors apparently,  

“just read into that, you know, all this deeper meaning of sadness or gloom or whatever. 
But really all it was, was that he was a broke college student and he had three tubes of 
paint, blue, white, and black – so everything he painted that semester was a mixture of 
those colors. And we love to laugh about that. How it’s like, no, I just didn't have any 
money to buy red or yellow or green. 

But then she continued, in considering what I had asked her about subconscious deeper 

meanings, “…but he also was kind of a moody art student... Maybe that's why he picked blue if 

 78 

 
 
 
he can only buy one color. He picked blue for a reason. And it was this… giant tube of oil paint. 

It was like the biggest cerulean blue ever created.”  

*** 

Do you think every place has a color?  

Since moving to Michigan, I’ve always felt 

like the air here is blue – like everything is covered 

with a blue/green hue. And I know that the trees and 

clouds are the main contributors of this feeling, but 

sometimes I feel like it goes beyond that. Like, the 

light is different here, different than any other place 

I’ve lived.  

Figure 19: Lubbock is gold 

I think Lubbock is gold – a warm tint covers the 

open skies, the red dirt. The city feels almost hazy in its 

warmth, like you can see the air, feel the sun reflect off the 

buildings. 

When my mom and I were talking about color 

theory, we were discussing how she chooses colors for 

maps. Sometimes it’s about the place – the color the place 

feels, like the geographical or architectural phenomena that 

give place color – the trees, the rivers, the sky, the colors of 

Figure 20: Budapest, one of 
the first maps in her shop 

the buildings, the color of the dirt.  

The colors of her Budapest map are based on a famous bridge that had turned a coppery 

turquoise color, while Paris is pastels – muted colors that match the greys and tans of the streets, 

 79 

of the old buildings. New York, on the other hand, is “a million different colors. And yes,” she 

says, “it's also a city with concrete everywhere. But then you have this swash of green with 

Central Park, and it's surrounded by water. It’s very interesting…” 

But for some maps, it’s not so much about the place itself but how the place is for a 

specific person – their own perception of the place, their own experience with it. Some of her 

customers on Etsy send her pictures of their living rooms, or paint swatches from the walls, with 

specific requests for making things fit, making the map match – be a part of the home they are 

creating. One customer sent her a picture of a series of travel posters in her dining room, asking 

she could make a map to fit. My mother says she found this process to be really beautiful, that 

she doesn’t “feel bad about doing that,” especially in thinking about the experience she had in 

college of painting something to match her home.  

She says:  

I mean, good design is good design. And it just made me happy that she trusted me to do 
it and that I could make something that would make her dining room beautiful. And her 
family will sit around that table, and they'll have this artwork from a bunch of different 
artists. And mine is just one of them. And it represents something special for their family. 

*** 

A map can show your family's favorite vacation spot or where you got married, or where 
you went to college. They take a snapshot of that moment.  

I feel like they kind of show you where you are in the world. With a map, you can zoom 
in or out as much as you want -- so if you think about when you're on your phone 
navigating, you can zoom in, within blocks, or you can zoom out and see the entire town 
and where you are on the road in that town as you go. So, home could be your street, your 
neighborhood, your city, your country, your state, your county, and where you are, among 
all those things around you. Like, is there a river? Is there a mountain range? Is there the 
ocean?  

Just like, this is… this is my place. This is my spot on the planet, you know?" 

[Interview with my mother, June 2023] 

 80 

 
 
 
 
 
*** 

My mother must've painted Lubbock at least twenty separate times – zoomed in, zoomed 

out. A large loop circles the city with a highway shooting diagonally across the center – the 

university campus is towards the middle of the circle, and the road curves oddly on Quaker Ave, 

I can picture how that curve looks from when I used to drive up and down it for doctor's 

appointments. The map itself is distinctive – there are patterns and shapes that are unique to this 

place, recognizable. In my mom's words, "you would know immediately it was Lubbock even if 

it wasn't labeled."  

I thought her choice of the word 'you' here was interesting in the sense that it sounded as 

if she was using a more general, plural you. You – a human, a reader – you would be able to 

recognize this map of Lubbock, Texas on sight. And I thought it was interesting because… no 

you wouldn't – not if you've never been there before, not if you had never seen a map of 

Lubbock before, or heard it described. For most of you, Lubbock, Texas might as well be a non-

city, a place you never plan to learn about or visit, just a town like any other town that exists 

whether you know about it or not.  

But for those of us who do know, it's different.  

I do realize that my mom was referencing the fact that many cities don't have such 

distinct markings, such a clear differentiation between it and other places. And I agree, I can't 

think of any other maps that are quite like Lubbock. But most places do have some sort of 

distinguishing factor, no matter how small, that makes it that place instead of some other place. 

The fact remains, however, that you're still only likely to identify those aspects if you have some 

type of relationship with that place.  

 81 

Relph (1985) in his chapter in Dwelling, place, and environment, speaks of the 

importance of our relationship to place as a key part of understanding the field of geography. Our 

associations with ‘place’ "do not need to be strong and positive" but are rather "set apart in time 

and space because they have distinctive meaning for us" (Relph, 1985, p. 27). This distinction of 

meaning is directly linked to the place itself, for us – it looks different for someone else. Rather, 

our sense of place is essentially a construction of “memories and affections through repeated 

encounters and complex associations" (Relph, 1985, p. 26). Place becomes meaningful because 

of lived experiences over time, these encounters create a nuanced sense of place in our minds, 

often tied to our sense of self.  

As an example of this, bell hooks describes her relationship with Kentucky in Belonging: 

A culture of place – “Kentucky hills were where my life began. They represent the place of 

promise and possibility and the location of all my terrors, the monsters that follow me and haunt 

my dreams” (1990). What a stunning description. “Kentucky,” she says, “is my fate” (hooks, 

1990). hooks describes something almost repetitive in how often she ends up back where she 

started from, how she pictures herself dying ‘here,’ on these same hills. (As I write this, it has 

been less than two years since she did pass, and I noted with beauty and sadness the sentence on 

the Wikipedia page, how she passed “at her home in Berea, Kentucky.”) This repetition, circular 

pattern of moving in, around, and back to is what gives place its meaning. Or, as hooks puts it, 

“…returning to my home state after all the years that I was living away, I found there essential 

remnants of a culture of belonging, a sense of the meaning and vitality of geographical place” 

(1990). 

Relph quotes Eric Dardel in L'Homme et la Terre, French for "Man and the Earth," 

written in 1952:  

 82 

Before any choice there is this 'place,' where the foundations of earthly existence and 
human condition establish themselves. We can change locations, move, but this is still to 
look for a place; we need a base to set down our Being and to realize our possibilities, a 
here from which to discover the world, a there to which we can return. (p. 27) 

In this quote I see several different key ideas – 1) "Before any choice" – this struck me. It 

made we reflect for a moment about the strange inevitability of place, the lack of agency in 

regards to choosing our starting point – we do not choose where we are born. We do not choose 

where we come from. At a certain point, however, we are all faced with the choice of where to go 

from here. Which brings us to the next part of Dardel's idea: 2) Movement – the lived experience 

of moving from one place to another, whether by choice or necessity, or by going somewhere 

near or far away. But it is always a search for a 'here' – I like Dardel's use of the word ‘base.’ 

Somewhere to go out from, somewhere to be able to return to.  

My mother spoke a lot about this concept – having a base, having a place to come back 

to. This was, in many ways, how she defined home. She gave me a description from when our 

family had been living out of the States, about how she would walk out of the house to go 

grocery shopping and have no idea where she was going, what she would encounter, how to 

navigate the different languages and cultures in this new town, this new country that she had 

never been to before. But home, she said, was the feeling afterwards, when she had all the things 

she needed, all the errands were complete and she would walk up the stairs to the third floor 

where our apartment was, and finally finally, walk back through the door.  

She paused.  

"And now this is my… this is my space. Does that make sense? Like it's about the 
physical walls in a way, but it's more about… this is what I know. This is what I'm 
familiar with. This is what I have control over. And I'm a person that comfort and control 
are kind of my go- to’s, the things that I longed for. As so… to feel so out of control out 
in the world and then to be able to come back." 

 83 

 
 
For Ahmed, this question of place, belonging, and the phenomenon of leaving and 

returning, is ultimately a question of orientation. "The starting point” she says, “for orientation is 

the point from which the world unfolds: the 'here' of the body and the 'where' of its dwelling. 

Orientations, then, are about intimacy of bodies and their dwelling places" (Ahmed, 2006, p. 8). 

As a term of directionality, orientation is concerned with which way we are turned and what (and 

who) we are turned towards. Because for Ahmed, she came to the term through a discussion of 

sexual orientation, a queering of phenomenology, and I came to the term through thinking about 

maps.  

Because though maps do work in the world – they hold incredible rhetorical power, they 

make arguments, they work to help us navigate from point a to point b in the present, and help us 

make sense of the past – I have always been interested in the way they are tools of orientation. 

And not just as a ‘you are here’ point of view on a map in an airport or in the mall, but in the 

ways in which we see ourselves in maps – how we locate the relationships between bodies, 

space, and time, and how this manifests in a feeling of familiarity. For example, Ahmed asks,  

“How do we begin to know or to feel where we are, or even where we are going, by 
lining ourselves up with the features of the ground we inhabit, the sky that surrounds us, 
or the imaginary lines that cut through maps? How do we know which way to turn to 
reach our destination?" (2006, p. 6)  

How do we know?  

*** 

Celina, Texas 

We were supposed to live there forever.  

 84 

 
The house we built had 

our writing in the walls, on the 

framing of the house – a bible 

verse over the doorway, prayers 

for sleep in my room (I always 

had nightmares). Every room was 

a different color – blues and 

greens and yellows. It had a big 

Figure 21: Pages from the Celina house scrapbook -- the floor 
plan, on writing on the wood framing 

yard, where my siblings and I played. It was where we grew up, it’s where my brother was born. 

My dad was the high school principal of the high school, and the town had just gotten its first red 

light.  

My mother made a 

scrapbook of the process of 

building the house – she 

took pictures of every stage 

of the process, kept records 

of what we wrote on the 

walls, talked about the 

floor plan, the design of 

each room. Everything was 

Figure 22: Pages from one of my mother's first scrapbooks, "Our 
First Apartment," "My First Job" 

documented, lovingly pieced together, carefully recorded for us to take with us, for us to look 

back on. She had always loved scrapbooking – our entire childhoods are documented in colorful 

books that she now keeps in a cabinet. She loved it before it became popular in the early 2000s, 

 85 

back when she drew everything by hand, decorating each page to tell a story of where we were, 

what we did, who we were. When pictures went digital she slowed down a bit, so my brother is 

only in a couple of the books in comparison to my sister and I. But every once and a while we’ll 

go through them, laughing at silly pictures and remembering things that might’ve been forgotten 

if I wasn’t looking at a picture of it happening.  

The book of the Celina house is painful. You can feel it in every page. We were supposed 

to live there forever – we knew it when we moved there from the Dallas area – out of the big city, 

into the country where we could spread out, where we would know everyone in town, where we 

could really settle, dig in.  

We only lived there for six years.  

When we left we sold everything, there was only a couple of pieces of furniture my mom 

kept at my grandparents’ house. We each got a keepsake box to fill with our memories and 

special items that we just couldn’t get rid of. How do you even begin to pick? Which things 

matter more than others? What do you keep, when the evidence of your entire life is laid out in 

front of you? 

It is difficult to explain my mother’s mindset during this time. I think I get my 

sentimentality from her – my father has never been attached to things. But for my mother and I, 

we feel the story of things when we look at each object. We feel the larger sense of connection to 

the past. And yet, when we were packing to move, I was on a one-track mind to simply get there, 

to move away, get out from this one way of living when I looked at the direction of my life. I 

didn’t want to live in that house forever, I didn’t want my life to look like my friends’ lives, my 

mother’s life – born and raised in one town. I wanted out.  

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And I didn’t understand my mother’s hesitancy, her fear. My 14-year-old-self looked at 

her and judged her for her fear, I wanted her to understand my need for adventure, I wanted her 

to feel it with me. I wasn’t scared of moving out of the country, why was she? And we left. We 

drove away from the house we built, left it empty, with all of our things in 17 suitcases, straight 

to the airport.  

I didn’t look back.  

*** 

Do we only know what home is when we leave home?  

As I’ve opened up myself to writing about home as phenomena, I have continuously 

encountered this idea in the stories of the people I talk to about my project. My mother talked 

about this concept – how she came to understand her childhood home on a different level after 

she had gone away to college. But how leaving Celina didn’t necessarily feel like it gave us a 

deeper appreciation for Celina as home, but rather a deeper sense of what home is and can be – 

how homes themselves “can move, as we do" (Ahmed, 2006, p. 9).  

hooks discusses this idea, saying:  

Living away from my native place, I become more consciously Kentuckian than I was 
when I lived at home. This is what the experience of exile can do, change your mind, 
utterly transform one’s perception of the world of home. The differences geographical 
location imprinted on my psyche and habits of being became more evident away from 
home. (1990) 

Our sense of place becomes deepened, nurtured, as we move – as we leave and return. 

We are disoriented and reoriented, our bodies both “'move away' as well as 'arrive,' as they 

reinhabit spaces” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 9). New places leave new impressions.  

“…the air, the smells, the sounds, which accumulate like points, to create lines, or 

which to accumulate like lines, to create new textures on the surface of the skin. Such 
spaces 'impress' onto the body, involving the mark of unfamiliar impressions, which in 
turn reshapes the body surface" (Ahmed, 2006, p. 9).  

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Are there places that change us, fundamentally? Go underneath our skin to live forever, 

inside our very bones, changing the way we see the world, change the way we move?  

*** 

San Pedro, Belize  

I remember the sand. The heat that washed over your body, the dust on the road. The 

buildings were typically made of concrete to withstand hurricanes, painted every color you could 

imagine. The palm trees overhung the cobblestone roads that our bikes bounced across on our 

way into town. I remember the strange calm of the beach, the waves crashing into the coral reef a 

mile from shore, never really allowing waves to reach land.   

I don’t think my mother will ever go back.  

All of the things she had ever cared about – how she thought about herself, her role as a 

mother, everything that made her who she is was put to the test on that island. Our finances, our 

food, our home – it was more out of control than it had ever been. There weren’t so much 

grocery stores as there were markets and overpriced shops for tourists. My sister and I did school 

online, my father worked at a local school, and my introverted mother was forced to go out and 

meet people, in order to figure out how to get us medical care if we got sick, or to go to the 

immigration office and make sure all of the paperwork was still in order.  

She couldn’t get comfortable – there was nothing known to latch onto, nothing solid or 

sure. The ground was constantly shifting beneath her feet, a constant sense of disorientation.  

I, for all my 14-year-old bravado, quickly discovered that my expectations for living 

abroad did not quite meet my reality. It was difficult to have moved somewhere where I didn’t 

know anyone and making friends while doing school online proved difficult. I had the realization 

at a very young age that the desire for adventure did not automatically alleviate the very real 

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effects of culture shock. And I looked to my mother with new eyes, seeing her fears as not 

something to be pushed past, but rather as a necessary tether to the practical. Though it was my 

dad, the dreamer who had ultimately brought us here, it was her who ensured we survived.  

It took me about a year to become oriented to life in Belize, when I was finally able to 

start to see light again – the sun felt brighter, the sand didn’t feel oppressive against my shoes. 

And though my mother joined a women’s sewing group, started painting for a local artist, and 

figured out her rhythm for shopping in local markets and cooking with local ingredients, I don’t 

think she herself ever felt solid.  

She said Belize was “pivotal” in her life, how she wrestled with her need for security, 

how difficult it had been to sell most of our possessions, what it felt like to sort of reconcile this 

moment of being forced to let go. As she said this to me, she knocked on the beat up, green 

painting table she was sitting next to, “this table right here actually has some meaning. It's kind 

of silly, but this table was in my dad's woodworking shop when I was a kid. And it's all beat up 

and it's really ugly. But he gave it to me and it's my painting table. And so like selling or giving 

away things that have a family history to them can be challenging, but in the end, it's just wood.”  

She said she was learning to “release” these things, learning that what was really 

important was “our family and that we're together, and we're going on this adventure together. 

So, what table we have or what dishes we have or what home we live in is really secondary…” 

It doesn’t matter what table we have – if what she’s saying is that meaning is put onto 

objects by people, then what matters is the people themselves, not the objects. If we need a table, 

we will get a table, and in Belize, we did just that.   

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The apartment we were renting did not have space for a table, it was originally designed 

as a vacation rental, not meant to be lived in long term, and all the furniture that came with the 

space barely fit into the 10x12 living room area. But my mom had a solution.  

“I don't know if you remember this,” she said. “We rearranged the furniture and put 

masking tape on the floor with the space that would work to fit a table and then we hired a local 

man to build a table that exact size. And it was a game changer.” 

“Now,” she said. “it was crowded. We had to shimmy around sometimes. We had a sofa 

in our bedroom instead of the living room to make it fit. But that table ended up being like the 

center of our home because we had so many conversations and meals and it just… changed 

everything for our family.”  

And when we left Belize after 3 years to move to Lubbock, the table we built there didn’t 

come with us. Instead, we came back to a different table that had been built for us – one that my 

mom had beaten with chains to give it life, one that had been built tall enough for my dad to fit, 

that was made for East Texas humidity, and had a hard time adjusting to the West Texas dry heat. 

And now there are new people who move in and around it, as my sister and I both graduated 

college and moved away, as my parents make new friends, new patterns and rhythms that feel so 

different as we look back at the places we’ve lived.  

And for my mother, it was like coming home.  

*** 

Lubbock, again 

The discussion of an innate ‘sense of direction’ has always fascinated me, as it is not 

something I ever seem to be able to gain for myself. I move through the world only with the 

memory of the routes I have taken a million times before, a muscle memory while I drive that 

 90 

helps me recognize and contextualize the roads and streets and directions. I do not know which 

way is north, but I know which way campus is from my house. For my mother, she apparently 

first gained her sense of direction in Lubbock, by doing the thing I just described. She said:  

When I came to college here, there were no GPS directions on your phone – we didn't 
even have phones, you had to have a paper map. And you had to have a street address and 
you had to know which way the street numbers went. But because the Texas Tech campus 
is kind of in the middle of the city, that was how I learned my north, south, east, west. 
Like I can tell you right now, I'm facing east, because I know that our street is out here," 
she points, "and then Indiana Avenue goes north, and the campus is over there, north of 
us. 

But that ever since then, ever since college in Lubbock, Texas, she's been able to figure out what 

direction she was going. She became ‘oriented’ here – a starting point from which to go out into 

the world, a sense of context and perspective of space and how to navigate it.  

In phenomenology, the table is often discussed as a key example of embodied 

perspective, of orientation in space. Husserl talks about the table from which he writes, the place 

from which the philosopher looks out at the world, the starting point, simply because “the table is 

the object nearest the body of the philosopher” (Ahmed, 2006, p. 3). By bringing the table to the 

front of the discussion, therefore, Ahmed argues that we are able to “show how ‘what’ we think 

‘from’ is an orientation device” – the places from which we do work and think are orientations 

devices that help us make sense of the world around us (2006, p. 3). As we move around the 

table, our perception shifts, “Keeping this table steadily in view as I go round it, changing my 

position in space all the time, I have continually the consciousness of the bodily presence out 

there of this one and the self-same table, which in itself remains unchanged throughout” 

(Husserl, qtd in Ahmed, p. 35). This emphasis on our bodies moving in and around objects and 

places, and how this movement changes our perspective on things that themselves don’t change 

is interesting to me, but I have to wonder – how unchangeable are they though, really? Yes, we 

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might leave and come back, but there are shifts and changing shapes that happen in the interim. 

The weathering of time, the weathering of being moved from place to place leaves its mark.  

It's like the table is a map, helping us orient, a point from which we go out from, and a 

point to come back to. I think of my mother saying that her family growing up would always 

‘come back together’ to eat at the table together. I think of how it welcomes us back in, all the 

chairs lining up around it, inviting us to a surface in which to share a meal, do a puzzle, draw, 

talk, play, write.  

In my mother’s life there are many tables, many surfaces on which things are made – the 

kitchen countertop that she agonized for years over before finally replacing from the old tile 

counter tops that never got fully clean; the little kitchen table that we sit at when it’s just a couple 

of us, that she got from her parents from when she was a little girl; the dining room table, that 

same one that she built with my grandpa, making it her own, making it fit for us. But I keep 

thinking about her painting table, the old green one that her father gave to her, that sits in her art 

studio. I think about how she’ll sit in there for hours on end, painting maps until the light from 

the big window makes it hard to see. I think about how my dad sits in there with her, watching 

TV or talking, and that when I visit home, it’s where I sit too.  

Because then I can watch her, both abstract and practical, paint her stories of place. 

Sitting at her art table, every color of paint sitting on the shelf, zooming in and out, in and out, in 

and out.  

 92 

 
 
CHAPTER 5: THE CABINET 

Here 

but not here 

           Not gone                     

but forgotten 

All that was left was                                       

love 

                          But it was a love                

   trapped 

With no words                                        

   to speak it  

 93 

 
 
 
 
                 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
    
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
*** 

The room is dark, and the carpet is thick, allowing you to pad softly through the living 

room in the gray morning light. The old clock on the wall ticks loudly, a sound that is foreign and 

familiar in the way it only seems to sound in these early mornings. As you hit the wood floors of 

the kitchen, the sound of your feet against the ground changes to be more high-pitched, but you 

see the light of the dining room ahead.  

You enter the room full of windows. Past the table, built out long with added leaves for 

your visit. And past the old cabinet with a million compartments that you and your cousins 

would spend hours searching through every drawer.  

And you would arrive at your destination -- the first one awake to sit in your 

grandmother's lap in her chair by the window. She wears the same purple robe. She sees you 

coming and sets down her bible that is ripping at the seams. You sit and watch the hummingbirds 

at the red feeder outside the window, behind the stained glass, in a world of deep green.  

*** 

What does time feel like?  

In our bodies? In our minds?  

Is it something we can sense? 

I can’t decide if I love or hate the sound of a clock. There’s something that feels nostalgic 

to me about it, something quiet and comforting – like the sound of a grandfather clock in the 

early morning hours.  

I don’t have one in my house now, a ticking clock. I think there would probably be a 

point where it would start to feel claustrophobic – time as moving, moving, moving. It does not 

stop for you, for me. Movement shouldn’t feel claustrophobic, but this feels, sometimes, like a 

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movement you can’t escape from, without a break or pause in its steady, consistent ticking. 

Forward, forward, forward. 

I both love and hate it, like I love and hate the gray hairs that popped into my hair this 

past year – just like they did for my mom, just like they did for my grandmother. Can I look to 

them and see, with some certainty, my own face with time etched into the surface of our very 

skin?  

We are as within time as we are within our bodies, steadily moving, (growing?), 

changing, in one moment and onward towards the next. Forward, forward, forward. 

*** 

There is a house on Iris Drive that still exists. It’s still 

standing, there are people who live there who might’ve added 

new fencing or new flooring, upkept the garden or let it go. It 

exists in time, in space, but I can’t access it there – because the 

house on Iris Drive, for me, exists only in memory.  

And what a strange memory it is. For example, I know 

that my grandparents replaced the carpet in the living room 

years before they moved away, but in my mind there is this in 

between, where the carpet is what it was when I was a child – 

Figure 23: Grandma and 
Grandpa dancing on the old 
carpet with the green stripe. 

a large dark green stripe along the periphery of the room where my brother would set up toy cars 

to drive along the edge like a road.  

There is a big blue chair in the corner with its blue leather ottoman, the fireplace is 

crackling – it must be around Christmas time. Someone is sitting at the old piano that’s always 

out of tune, playing Christmas carols – it’s probably Olivia.  

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My mother is in the kitchen with my 

grandma – they’re making pies, but my 

grandmother insists my mother sit down when she 

asks what she can do to help. There are usually 

more pies than people because grandma wants to 

make everyone’s favorite even though she knows 

we can’t eat them all. We still try.  

Figure 24: My sister Olivia and I 
helping Grandma make my favorite 
Christmas pie. 

My dad and grandpa are outside chopping firewood and Olivia and I are playing with the 

colorful piles of leaves (is it fall?). We race down the steep driveway on bikes or wagons or the 

toy cart we called a go-kart that had no engine and that my grandfather found in a dumpster one 

year and fixed it up in his shop. We swing on the tree swing until grandma calls us in for dinner 

by ringing the bell on the porch that sits on a tower of ivy. We sit at the long dining room table 

always with a new tablecloth and matching napkins and drink 

sweet tea. 

When it was time for bed, Olivia and I would go to the 

room we usually slept in, we called it the Princess Room, that 

was my mother’s growing up. What would we do the next 

morning? Would we go on a walk in the forest, build a fort, visit 

the chicken coop, pick blackberries? Or would we sit outside on 

Figure 25: The bell 

the porch swing with grandma and drink lemonade, and later we 

 96 

convince grandpa to take us for a ride in the back of the old blue truck. He would fill the bed of it 

with quilts and we would drive to go watch 

fireworks. (Is it summer?) 

…It is summer, it is spring, it is fall. It’s 

Christmas morning, it’s a random weekend trip, 

it’s the week during the summer where my 

grandparents would host all the cousins and 

called it Grandkids Camp.  

I am there, I am not there. And all at once 

Figure 26: My aunt Dana and my cousin 
Milo with my grandparents and I, sitting in 
the back of the old blue truck 

I’m small enough to sit in grandma’s lap and a teenager reading in the back room, tired of all the 

noise. My sister still wears glasses, and maybe I’m wearing the orange sweatshirt from my 

hometown’s high school football team. My mom honks the car horn as we pull into the long 

driveway and we see my grandmother come running out of the back door, up the wooden 

pathway, past the berry bushes, past the bell, and up to the car where I open the door to be hit 

with the humidity of green, the overwhelming scent of pine trees.  

And the feeling that seems to be located behind my lungs is that of calm and that of a 

type of relief. Perhaps it’s that we’ve arrived after a decently long car trip across the expanse that 

is the state of Texas, perhaps it’s that the scent of pine is so unique that I am automatically 

connected to that same feeling I’ve had in my chest at least once a year for as long as I have the 

capability of remembering.  

You’re here! shouts Grandma. 

I’m here.  

*** 

 97 

Before I could press record on the video camera sitting in my lap, I sat with my 

grandparents in their living room in Lubbock, Texas. We are far away from the house on Iris 

Drive, far away from the tiny town of Gladewater, deep in the woods of East Texas.  

I sit on the same plaid couch, grandpa in his maroon recliner, grandma in her new blue 

chair. I’m telling them about my project, nervous about the way my grandma’s eyes don’t quite 

settle on me fully. But she seems relaxed, which is both good and slightly disconcerting. I’m 

more used to her offering me a glass of water every couple of minutes like she did last summer 

when I visited.  

But before I finish telling them what I’m doing, that this interview is about what home is 

to them, before I set up my camera on its stand, my grandmother speaks.   

“Home is where you are.” 

She doesn’t repeat it in the next couple of days as I am in and out of their house, stopping 

by to look at old pictures or record different parts of their home in Lubbock, but it sticks with 

me. Because I knew, even then, that this would be one of the few things I have from her – these 

tiny little moments that the camera doesn’t catch – where she looks me in the eyes and is there.  

I remember thinking, over and over, as I set up my camera to hit record, “don’t forget, 

don’t forget, don’t forget.”  

*** 

My grandparents moved to Lubbock, Texas in 2019 – 2 full years after my grandmother 

had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Her father had passed away from the disease a 

year after I was born, and so we knew it ran in the family. My mother and her siblings knew long 

before her diagnosis, hushed conversations taking place about the way my grandma would ask 

the same question too many times or would get turned around when driving on streets she had 

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driven for almost 50 years. I think both my grandparents were nervous for my grandmother to 

actually get diagnosed. I remember my mother coming home from visiting them frustrated 

because she felt like they were in denial, that knowing would help them prepare, make decisions, 

make the most of the time they had.  

But I know for my grandpa, at least, knowing sooner rather than later didn’t change 

much. His own health was up and down, with multiple heart surgeries affecting his ability to care 

for such a large piece of property. They already knew they had to move.  

From Gladewater, the nearest family was at least a 6-hour drive, and my grandparents 

couldn’t afford to hire any help around the house, what with my grandpa’s fixed social security 

income after retiring in his 60s. So, years and years before my grandma was diagnosed, years 

before they even hired a realtor to look at their property, they had already decided to move to 

Lubbock, Texas. My grandpa was a big fan of the college town’s football team and my grandma 

just wanted to be closer to my mother. But with this decision came quite an overwhelming reality 

– my grandparents had lived in the same house since my mother was 4 years old. Every closet, 

every cabinet, every shelf was full to the brim with things – objects and memories and pieces of 

themselves, their children, their grandchildren. How do you pack up and move a full life 8 hours 

across the state of Texas?  

There were arguments, there were spreadsheets, there were long weekends where my 

mom would drive down just to help go through one closet. My grandmother alternated between 

wanting to get rid of everything and not being able to let a single thing go. My grandparents were 

both so overwhelmed by the task – they knew they didn’t want to (couldn’t) take everything with 

them, and, more morbidly, that all of it would eventually have to be sorted through when they 

both were gone. But how do you sell an antique or something that has been in the family for 

 99 

years – both emotionally and practically? Do you host an estate sale? Do you sell them online? 

How can you sell them online when my grandma can barely log into a computer? 

Every item must be accounted for. Every item required a decision. Keep, sell, give away, 

throw away. Keep, sell, give away, throw away. The dresses my grandmother sewed for my 

mother on her first day of school, directly next to the dress she herself wore on her first day of 

school, handsewn by her mother. The coloring books from when we were children. The scraps of 

fabric from different sewing projects. Jewelry, artwork, candles, dishes, Christmas decorations. 

My grandpa went through his massive woodshop and sold most of what was years of equipment, 

sorted through the garage, sold the white jeep that had driven them through the mountains in 

northern New Mexico almost every summer. They left behind the swing set, the fire pit, an 

empty barn. They took the porch swing, the old blue truck, and a garage full of projects that my 

grandpa still insisted he was working on.  

It took years, with my grandma slowly losing her ability to remember what was where, 

what belonged to who, and what they had already talked about doing. And I remember one of my 

aunts worrying out loud about if it was a good idea for them to move at all – what if throwing 

grandma into a completely new environment was too much for her? What if it all became too 

much to process, what if she never got her bearings in Lubbock, or ever again? She had seemed 

excited to move most of the time, I vividly remember sitting on the porch with her, it must’ve 

been one of the last times I was there with them, and her sighing and saying, “I can’t wait to 

just… go.” It felt to me as though she was saying she was ready for it to be over – the house had 

become too much, the moving process was too much – how freeing, how safe, to just be done.  

They had stopped attending the church they had gone to for my mother’s entire childhood 

a couple of years back, citing religious differences. They didn’t go into town much, they weren’t 

 100 

as close with their neighbors. Their health continued to decline; the yard started to become 

overgrown.  

It was time.  

Last Pictures 

On my mother’s computer is a collection of pictures of my grandparent’s house that can 

only be described as ‘last pictures’ – last pictures taken before everything was packed away to be 

moved, last pictures taken before they drove away. An empty garage, the back porch with the 

swing still attached, a shadowed shot of the house from the road, my grandparents on the porch 

the day they drove to Lubbock.  

One of the last times I was at 

their house in Gladewater, my 

grandma insisted that we take a trip 

to the holly tree. It was just around 

Christmas time, and the tree was 

located in the pasture behind their 

property – owned by the Prince’s, we 

always called it Prince’s pasture, but 

when I was young, I misheard the 

possessive and thought we would go 

on walks together as a family in 

Princess Pasture. My grandma liked 

Figure 27: Last Pictures 

to go to the holly tree and get fresh greenery for her mantle, making everything special, making 

everything beautiful just as she had every year since before I was born, and every year since.  

 101 

But there was something about that walk to the holly tree – us climbing through the fence 

between the two properties, just like we always had, walking with purpose with a bag and 

scissors for my grandma to take her holly clippings.  

Leaves covered the ground, and I sensed, as they sensed, that this was some type of last. 

A last Christmas, a last visit to the holly tree, a last visit for me and my siblings.  

My mother, in her wisdom, took a picture and was able to capture… something. A 

moment in time? Something about place? I look at it and feel, somehow, a mixture of a strange 

type of grief and an overwhelming peace. I think it might be the way they’re standing. What are 

they thinking about? Are they feeling the last-ness? Or are they simply being there – the sound of 

the wind through the trees, the crunch of the leaves beneath our feet as it breaks through the 

heavy quiet of the East Texas woods.  

My mother still maintains that this is 

her favorite picture of them she ever took.  

*** 

What a strange thing memory is – so 

deeply interconnected with our sense of 

selves, our sense of place, the people and 

things around us. The way it is housed and/or 

experienced so uniquely in our bodies, in our 

Figure 28: in the woods 

brains – muscle memory, sights, smells, sounds, the way our hippocampus lights up as it works 

to store long-term memories through different groupings and connections between neurons. It’s 

so… physical. And yet I often think about how most neurological diseases and disorders and 

diseases feel almost… invisible.  

 102 

In 2017, the same year my grandma was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, I was diagnosed 

with an anxiety disorder that required me to take medication to balance a chemical issue within 

the synapses and receptors of serotonin in my brain. But before the medication did work, I was 

convinced that there was some other issue, that the medication wouldn’t work for me because it 

really wasn’t a problem in my brain at all. It was just… me. So, it wasn’t just as if the chemical 

imbalance I was experiencing was invisible to others, it was also, somehow, invisible to myself. I 

had a hard time connecting what I was feeling in my body to the idea of my brain experiencing a 

physical affliction that could be helped by medication. And this made sense, as I later learned, 

because the brain affects every part of my body – my behavior, my thinking, my emotions. And 

if the brain is the thing being affected, it becomes very difficult to sense that experience as a 

physical issue.  

This became clearer still as I observed my grandmother struggle to sense her own 

disease. I remember so vividly her sighing in frustration as she couldn’t remember the name or 

the word she was looking for in her story.  

“I’m just dumb,” she’d say.  

We’d react strongly, “no, Grandma!” we’d say. “You’re not dumb, you have a memory 

disease.”  

This, however, didn’t seem to help, since she would later forget the conversation, and call 

herself dumb, or stupid, or forgetful all over again.  

I learned with Alzheimer’s that the brain literally shrinks over time. There is such intense 

damage to all parts of the brain, but often beginning in the memory center, long before people are 

diagnosed. Even early on in understanding the disease, researchers noticed the physical effects 

on the brain. Identified as “plaques” and “tangles,” research shows “abnormal clusters of protein 

 103 

fragments, build up between nerve cells” – plaques; and “dead and dying nerve cells [that] 

contain tangles, which are made up of twisted strands of another protein” (Alzheimer’s 

Association). And while scientists still don’t understand what causes this cell death and tissue 

loss in patients, they are able to clearly identify consistent patterns in those who suffer from the 

disease. In doing so they have been able to identify the type of protein that forms the plaques, 

and form two treatments that remove this protein to temporarily slow cognitive and functional 

decline.  

My grandmother has been taking this medicine now for 6 years. Within the past year or 

two I have witnessed a pretty severe decline in her ability to communicate and function with day-

to-day tasks. I remember vividly when my mom called me about a year and a half ago to tell me 

that grandma had apparently come into the room where my grandpa was, crying, to tell him that 

she couldn’t remember how to make the bread anymore – the bread that she had made every 

week for as long as I could remember, the bread that had been passed down for generations by 

way of an ancient sourdough starter that family legend tells came over on a boat from Germany 

in the late-1800s. Muscle memory. Something engrained in her very being – gone.  

Time became her enemy; her own brain became her enemy – a physical decay, a physical 

loss that is tied so directly to her experience of her own mind, her own body, her own sense of 

self – what it is to be a “me” or a “you.” Things known become, over time, things unknown – 

like some type of horrific, violent reversal. And as physical as Alzheimer’s is, its effects clear as 

scientists study brain scans and families watch loved ones lose themselves, scientists are still 

searching for what sparks the damage itself, some invisible force with these all too visible 

e/affects.  

 104 

…As my grandma’s hand hesitates once again as she reaches for the door to the kitchen 

cabinet, wondering if she will, this time, find what she is looking for.   

*** 

In Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s posthumous book The visible and the invisible (1968), 

Merleau-Ponty makes a very interesting connection between things seen, things experienced (the 

visible), and things felt, things thought (the invisible) through the mediation of the body. The 

book itself is a strange thing in its inherent incompleteness – we have four chapters, and the rest 

of the book is made up of working notes. The untimely passing of Merleau-Ponty in the midst of 

writing this book, changes, for me and others, the experience of the book itself and how I come 

to understand the ideas within it. One of his other works, The phenomenology of perception 

(1962), also is an important book within phenomenological thinking, especially in the way it has 

worked to establish an embodied phenomenology – a phenomenology that is situated by an 

understanding of ourselves as sensing bodies that are both perceived and the way in which we 

perceive the world around us. This both/and of the body as sensing and sensed is most clearly 

described in the final (complete) chapter in The visible and the invisible as an example of a 

chiasm, or intertwining.  

According to Scot Barnett (2015) in his article on “Chiasms: Pathos, phenomenology, and 

object-oriented rhetorics,” Merleau-Ponty, in his discussion of chiasm, “no doubt had in mind the 

rhetorical figure of the chiasmus. A reference to the Greek letter X (chi), chiasmus performs a 

literal “crossing” in language in which one phrase doubles over and intertwines with another. 

[C]hiasmus,” he says, “draws different parts together while at the same time coiling them back 

over again” (2015).  

A tangling. A reversal.  

 105 

Stanford Encyclopedia’s section on Merleau-Ponty, describes that in English and French, 

chiasm also has meaning in reference to “anatomical or genetic structures with a crossed 

arrangement (such as the optic nerves).” For how Merleau-Ponty uses the term, they go on to 

describe the idea of a chiasm as “a crisscrossing or a bi-directional becoming or exchange 

between the body and things that justifies speaking of a “flesh” of things, a kinship between the 

sensing body and sensed things that makes their communication possible.” In other words, the 

fact that we have bodies allows us to sense the world – we sense our bodies, we sense through 

our bodies, and we both make and sense meaning with and through our bodies. The lines 

between the sensing and the sensed are thus, blurred, there is an inherent back-and-forth nature 

to the bodily experience of the world.  

I think this understanding of the way our bodies sort of chiasm-ically mediate our senses 

has helped me make sense of the relationship between memory and body and between memory 

and self. The visible and the invisible. The relationship between what we can see and what we 

can’t see is incredibly important to the limitations and affordances of being in body.  

I can see my hand reaching, I can sense whatever it is that I touch. I can see my desk, I 

can see the light from my lamp overhead. I can see the way my grandma struggles, I can see the 

changes in her behavior, mood, language, I can know the disease is directly affecting each of 

these visible factors. But, for her, the physical (her brain) has hindered her from experiencing the 

reality of that physical phenomenon. The truth of the disease has precluded her bodily experience 

of the disease itself, causing her to experience loss while also losing the very sensation of that 

loss. What is left, I would imagine, is emptiness.  

 106 

This, to me, is chiasmic. This is visible and invisible. It is tangled in its own back-and-

forth, in the crisscrossing of what it means to be able to sense what is around us and make sense 

of it as human beings, with bodies and minds so fragile.  

*** 

When interviewing my mother and sister, I was left often going back to the footage to 

find meaning in their words, to sort through hours of footage, hours of stories, and dive into the 

meaning I found in how they told their own stories, how they conceptualized the home, the 

things around them, and themselves.  

With my grandmother, there were simply less words.  

I had the words of my grandfather and many others, and I had the few words she did say, 

but locked in my mind, almost at the tip of my tongue were the words of my own memory. As 

Grandma would begin a story, in a way that felt halting and unsure, she would always eventually 

pause to let my grandpa fill in the pieces. But there, in some of those stories, I too wanted to fill 

in the pieces, but with the words I had heard her speak what felt like a million times before. It’s 

like I can still hear her, telling me the story of her mother and father during Christmas time – 

how her mother would put things in lay-away before her father got his once-a-year Christmas 

bonus. And how they would get everything they needed, every little thing in one day on that 

Christmas bonus – socks, shoes, razors, fabric, kitchen supplies.  

I can hear it.  

And yet, her words are hidden from me. Hidden, perhaps, from herself. Hidden away in 

her own fading memory, hidden by language, tucked away in cabinets. But not gone, I don’t 

think. Not truly.  

Because I can still hear it.  

 107 

*** 

In my grandparent’s house there are many cabinets. 

Kitchen cabinets, antique cabinets, a TV cabinet, a cabinet 

for sewing, for my grandpa’s collection of antique guns, for 

old records. Sometimes, like with the antique cabinets, the 

meaning for my grandparents is in the cabinet itself instead 

of what is kept tucked away inside. For instance, there are 

two cabinets that seem to always be kept next to each other 

in my grandparent’s kitchen. One is, and has always been, 

called “Grandma’s cabinet” – this was my grandfather’s 

Figure 29: Grandma's 
cabinet, next to the jelly 
cabinet 

grandmother’s kitchen cabinet, with different cupboards and compartments for flour and sugar 

and spices, for dishes and utensils. According to my grandpa it always came as a pair with the 

dining room table that they still have today. As a child, this cabinet almost always served as a 

catch-all cabinet – a place for scissors and pens and knickknacks, with one drawer hosting a 

million types of colorful paper napkins – themed for every holiday: Christmas, 4th of July, 

birthdays, Thanksgiving. I remember one summer, during the week we affectionately called 

Grandkid’s camp, where all the cousins would stay at Grandma and Grandpa’s house with no 

parents, my grandma assigned us a creative writing activity. She dumped out the contents of one 

of the drawers and told us to write a story about something we found. I have such a clear 

memory of the feeling of staring at all of the objects on the table, deciding where I might find a 

story and what that story could be, but I can’t for the life of me remember what any of the objects 

were. I don’t know what I wrote about, but I wonder if she kept those stories somewhere written 

in all of our child-like handwriting.  

 108 

And next to Grandma’s cabinet, there is a tall and skinny green and yellow cabinet that 

my grandpa called the jelly cabinet. I don’t remember referring to it like that growing up, I just 

remember that it is what held all of Grandma’s million different tablecloths – there were plastic 

ones themed for different holidays, there were plaid ones 

perfect to serve as a picnic blanket outside, there were 

antique, hand-embroidered cloth ones handed down over 

generations. My grandpa told me though that this cabinet 

also belonged to his grandmother and was where she stored 

her jellies after canning the fruit of the season. Apparently, 

my mother had painted it white at one point when it had 

belonged to her, but when my grandparents got it back 

(maybe when we moved to Belize?) they decided to paint 

Figure 31: my grandma on moving 
day, with those "horrible" blue 
cabinets 

it the original colors. Or, close to the original colors. The inside of the cabinet shows a different 

color green that what is one the outside – a much brighter, 

almost fluorescent lime green than the muted green they 

chose.  

This cabinet became the inspiration for the color 

scheme for their new kitchen cabinets in Lubbock. I 

remember them moving into their new house in West Texas 

Figure 30: Green and gold 

and my grandmother being absolutely horrified by the color of the kitchen cabinets – she had 

seen them in pictures, but in person, it seemed, they were much worse. They were somehow both 

a dark and bright shade of blue and did not align with my grandparent’s antique style. When they 

 109 

decided to paint them green and gold, my mother tried to argue they just pick one color, or 

something more neutral, but they insisted, and green and gold it was.  

I don’t know why cabinets come to mind when I think of my grandmother. For one, when 

I picture my grandma, it is often in the kitchen. She always seemed to have such mastery over it 

– opening and closing cabinet doors with ease, always making everyone’s favorites, along with 

an ever-present side of fresh baked bread. It’s why it broke my heart to hear my mom tell me the 

story of my grandma not being able to make the bread anymore. It was the end of an era. My 

grandma rarely sets foot into the kitchen now.  

Or maybe it’s that, when I think of their house on Iris Drive, there were always… things. 

Things stacked, things stored, things tucked away in, you guessed it, cabinets. There might be 

some type of mystery to me in the opening of an unfamiliar cabinet – what is hidden behind that 

door. What will I find when I open it? What is kept here, stored safely away, invisible to me until 

I reach out to pull open the door and make something, anything, visible. Before closing it once 

more, leaving its contents accessible to me only in memory, or until I reach out again.  

*** 

There is a jar that lives on a shelf in my refrigerator – the sourdough jar. The same jar she 

gave me almost three years ago when my husband, then boyfriend, and I visited Lubbock and 

asked her to show us how to make the bread.  

 110 

We watched together as she took two jars out of the refrigerator, both labeled with sharpie 

on masking tape, “1” and “2”. She added sugar, and we drank 

lemonade on the back porch while the jars came up to room 

temperature, but once they were ready, she poured the jars into 

her mixing bowl along with flour and salt and water – showing 

us each step, talking about when to know if you need more 

water or flour. She didn’t measure the salt – just a pinch. Not 

too much, not too little.  

And it felt different even then, watching her. I 

remembered then what it was like to watch her in her old 

Figure 32: Grandma 
teaching me to make the 
sourdough… the first time 

kitchen, the one with white cabinets with red handles – how confident her movements were, how 

she reached with ease for a bowl, for a spatula to scrape the dough off the sides. And now, in this 

kitchen, where the cabinets are green and gold, her movements are noticeably hesitant, not 

remembering where she put the spatula once she sets it down.  

We come back to their house that evening to try the finished product, and she laments 

about how it didn’t turn out correctly – issues with the oven, Lubbock’s altitude – but we all 

happily ate it, as small and dense as it was – nothing like I remember it as a child. And it is there 

that she hands me the jar labeled “2” that still sits in my refrigerator, that we somehow got 

through the Lubbock airport on our way back to Michigan, using a sugar packet from the coffee 

bar on the plane to keep it fed.  

And now, every week, just like I watched her do every week, I take my jar out of the 

refrigerator, feed it different sugars and flours to get it bubbling to life, filling the whole jar. I add 

flour and water and salt, kneading it together, doing the steps in a slightly different order than 

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what she had shown me, but still following the basic concept. And after a couple of hours, the 

dough fills the bowl and it is at that point that I always always take a piece of the dough, about 

the size of an egg, and put it back in my jar labeled “2” with a little bit of water at the top. Just 

like my grandma did, just like my great-grandma did, and on and on and on.  

*** 

I asked my grandparents to tell me the story of the bread. My grandmother, who I had 

heard this story from a thousand times, turned to my grandfather. 

He began:  

My great-grandmother immigrated from Germany in about 1885. I’m… not sure about 
the year but I know it was the mid 1880s. And the story is that when they came from 
Germany, she brought a sourdough bread starter with them. They came over in steerage 
on a steamship, and they brought the bread starter because in steerage you had to cook 
your own food… that’s what we were told. I have semi-verified this with some from the 
Smithsonian Institute, but I don’t know for a fact. But the story is that my great-
grandmother, her name was Lena Barfknecht, and my grandmother was maybe seven or 8 
years old when they immigrated. And so, when she married my grandfather, she got the 
sourdough starter and she made the bread. Then my mother got the starter, and she made 
the bread. And when Alice and I got married, Alice got the starter and now she makes the 
bread. And we’ve given you a starter and you and your husband, Chayce, make the bread. 
So, it’s been handed down generation to generation. 

So, this bread is like, 150 years old or more. I don’t know how far back it goes. We know 
it’s prior to 1885, but how far back it goes I have no idea.”  

I responded at this point in the story, reflecting on how if the story is true, we don’t know if his 

great-great grandmother was the one to begin the starter. “Maybe it was handed down from her 

mother,” I said.  

“And from her mother, and her mother…” my grandpa trailed off.  

The story of the boat is not ‘legend’ per say – my grandpa and mother have both done 

some extensive family history research and have found the passenger list of a ship called the 

Hohenzollern going from Prussia to Galveston, Texas in 1885, clearly listing my great-great 

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grandfather, Wilhelm Lunow with his mother and stepfather, who came across the sea when he 

was 10 years old. But the way my grandpa tells it, it was his great-grandmother who brought it 

over on a ship, who he named as Lena Barfknecht. But as I looked at the family tree, it was his 

grandmother, not his great-grandmother, who was named Lena, and it was her who came over by 

boat at 7 or 8 years old. His great-grandmother was named Louise.  

But we know Lena Barfknecht and Wilhelm Lunow eventually were married, and we 

know they had my great-grandmother, Herta Helene (Helen) Tucker, who lived to be 104 years 

old, and would occasionally sing Christmas songs in German when the mood struck her. And we 

know my grandpa grew up eating the bread every week for his entire life. And I grew up with my 

grandma making it every week. And now it is passed to me.   

In my grandpa’s words, “And when you think about how many years and how many 

millions and millions of loaves have been baked from that original starter… and it’s still alive.”  

It's still alive.  

*** 

Engelland, in his 2021 book Phenomenology, begins his chapter titled “Life” with the 

following quote:  

To taste a slice of freshly baked bread crowned with a pat of butter is not only to taste the 
bread and the butter but to taste oneself as alive and the recipient of that experience. […] 
Right there in the tasting […] there is an implicit, background experience of oneself. And 
were it not for this self-experience we would not relish the experience of these other 
things; we would not avidly seek them out to enjoy them. Our motive to experience 
would evaporate. 

Is this not both beautiful and tragic? How our experiences are not just experiences of a moment 

or a thing, but of ourselves. And without this ability to process ourselves as experiencing a thing, 

we are not truly alive, are we? To eat the bread is not just about the eating, but about the being 

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while eating. To be here, to be you, and no one else, at this moment in time, with this specific 

slice of specific bread.  

*** 

My grandmother was born in 1945 to Edgar Elbert Albright and Maize Kathryn 

Ledbetter. She was the youngest of three sisters. Her mother, who went by Kathryn, was a harsh 

woman. She wasn’t ever described to me as gentle, or kind, or even loving. She died before I was 

born. In a “family history” scrapbook my mom and I worked together for my 8th grade family 

history project, my grandma wrote about her mother. Kathryn Ledbetter was born in 1920 as the 

7th child, raised on the Ledbetter farm. According to my grandma, she didn’t graduate high 

school because she had to pick cotton in the fall, but she later took her GED and passed because 

having a diploma was important to her.   

She wrote:  

She married my daddy, Edgar Elbert Albright on September 3, 1938. He was a day 
laborer making $1.00 a day for a long time. They moved from farm to farm looking for a 
better deal or house or something. In November 1952 we moved from Coppell to 
Lewisville. I was in the 2nd grade. We rented a little house on Edwards Street. We heated 
only the kitchen and Mother and Daddy’s bedroom. Many times my room (shared with 
my 2 sisters) was cold enough to make jello! We built a new home at 653 Milton Street 
when I was in the 5th grade. I had my own room for the first time ever!!! We were so 
proud of it! My mother worked all the time. She sewed for 3 girls and herself. She canned 
and froze untold amounts of food every summer. She cooked yummy meals.  

She cooked yummy meals. I think about this line a lot. My first memory of hearing about my 

great-grandmother was about what an amazing cook she was – a truly talented woman – but that 

when she died, according to my mother, this seemed to be the only thing people could say about 

her. What a great cook, what a talented cook. When my parents were naming my sister, they gave 

her the middle name Catherine, specifically spelling the name differently as to not be naming 

 114 

 
Olivia directly after a woman who did not, or could not, foster a legacy that went beyond what 

she could do to who she really was.  

It always seemed to me that my grandma was almost adopted into my grandpa’s family’s 

traditions and legacies. My grandma would always speak very fondly of the experience of 

coming into my grandpa’s family when she was a young woman, as my grandma and grandpa 

were high school sweethearts and lived just down the street from each other. And I always loved 

hearing about what it was like for her to come into a family that seem to genuinely care for each 

other. There was something calm and peaceful for her about watching my other great-

grandmother, Helen Tucker, another talented cook, bake bread or make fried chicken with her 

secret recipe that turned out to be just straight bacon grease.  

But I think the way my grandma was raised matters. In the same family history 

scrapbook, I found the section she wrote about her father:  

My Daddy was away almost all my life. After years as a farm laborer, he started driving a 
truck for Shovel Supply company in Dallas. My sisters and I could hear the sound of his 
truck coming home before it was in sight. “Daddy is home,” we squealed as we ran out 
the front door. He would blow the air horn announcing his arrival to all within hearing 
distance. I would crawl up the big truck steps into Daddy’s arms.  

Probably my best memories of Daddy were while I sat on the ice cream freezer and he 
cranked. He was close to me and talked to me then. We girls rotated this daddy time until 
we thought we were too big.  

The years were hard on Daddy. For a while he rotated between the houses of us three 
girls. His mind began to blur with Alzheimer’s disease. Once while visiting us Daddy 
took Lesley to Gladewater to buy minnows for fishing. When it was time to come home, 
he could not remember how to get back. He told 12-year-old Lesley to drive home.  

Once while Daddy was in the hospital he recognized me and smiled in that recognition. 
We held hands and sang “Amazing Grace,” his favorite hymn. That was the last time on 
earth he knew who I was. But someday up yonder, we will sing together again.  

 115 

 
 
 
 
To be honest, I sobbed for an hour after reading this. I don’t know why it hit me so hard – 

maybe it was her use of the word “yonder – the most quintessential East Texas term I can think 

of, or fact that it wasn’t until I read it that I remembered that her father had died of the same 

disease she now has, or the idea that she wrote this, all of this, and it’s beautiful. I love to see her 

words laid out on the page, her memories of her father, her memories of her mother.  

She doesn’t write this way anymore. She doesn’t write at all. 

I remember my mom saying that my grandmother should’ve been an English major. She 

worked in libraries her whole life, saving books that were being thrown out and bringing them 

home. She helped my mother with her English homework, helping her find meaning in the 

poetry they were assigned. And while I was getting my own English degree she would look at me 

and tell me how her biggest regret was never finishing college.  

When we looked at this scrapbook together last summer, and we got to the page about her 

father, she looked at the picture and smiled.  

“That’s my daddy. He was always gone.” 

All of her words, all of her stories, boiled down to the bare bones of meaning, to just four 

words. Her life, her parents lives and the impact they had on her, reduced to these key phrases – 

“she cooked yummy meals,” “he was always gone.” So much complexity buried in these few 

words, and I can hear all of it, just underneath the surface, the emotion that carries through these 

things we know by heart.  

*** 

For as long as I can remember, my grandparents have had a rather large collection of 

projector slides. The back closet of their home was filled with reels of slides that my grandpa 

would bring out on certain nights when we were all at their house.  

 116 

We called them Big Pictures because of the way we would all gather around in the living 

room with the big projector screen – bigger than any TV I had ever encountered as a child. We 

would turn out all of the lights and my grandpa would sometimes just choose a reel at random – 

with labels going all the way back to the 70s. We would see trips to the mountains in my 

grandpa’s jeep, my mom when she was around 9 or 10, birthdays, the births of the grandkids, 

more pictures of the mountains. And every time my grandpa would narrate, with others chiming 

in – “oh I remember this! This was the trip where…” and so on.  

And I loved it, sitting in the dark, turning to my mother to see the spark of recognition in 

her eyes as pieces of her whole life would pop up on screen. How it felt when we would watch 

new enough slides that had me as a baby or my sister. The way it felt to be on the big screen, a 

slightly blurry glow on the faces of everyone around me.  

But what stuck with me most, I think, was the sound.  

The faint whirring of the machine, almost as if the beam of light itself coming from the 

bulb, shining through the dust of the dark room has a sound, then there’s a shifting noise, and 

click.  

The next slide is in place.  

Then again, the hum of the machine, a shift, a click.  

Hum, shift, click.  

Hum, shift, click.  

I watched some big pictures with my grandparents this past summer – their newest goal is 

to get the slides digitized – over 100 reels, with each reel holding about 100 slides. The work is 

overwhelming, and I decided to help them research – trying to find deals online for places 

working with projector slides for less than something like $1.00 per slide. But we also just 

 117 

watched a couple of reels, for old times’ sake, being brought back to watching the light flicker 

across my grandma’s face, the sound of my grandpa’s voice as he told each story with crystal 

clear recall – going back over 50 years.  

A picture of my grandma came onto the screen. Her face was young, my mom had yet to 

be born.  

“That’s me!” she said, sounding almost surprised.  

Grandpa nodded, “Yes, that’s you.”  

Hum, shift, click.  

*** 

I asked her what the word ‘home’ means to her.  

Without hesitation, she responds. “Love.”  

She pauses then for a moment, considering her words. But then she nods. 

“Love.”  

*** 

"Love lets us see what is there to be seen; it lets us succumb to the very being of the 

beloved. […] love lets us receive things as they are." -Engelland, 2020, p. 120 

*** 

“…And maybe that's where I learned it from, from watching my mom.” 

I’m sitting with my mother, and we’re talking about home. This ended up being one of 

my favorite conversations from the entire time I was in Texas last June, we had started talking 

about what it meant to make a home, and how various home-making skills are often referred to 

as “care tasks” – daily practices that constitute caring for a home or caring for others. And my 

mom started talking about her mother. 

 118 

All she did was care about others. She cared for the home, she cared for the garden, the 
children, she fed us, she made all of my clothes, she sewed. She volunteered at the school 
and church, she made everything beautiful and special. Like, remember when you were 
little and she had all those paper napkins and it was just to make you feel special – oh 
here's a napkin with polka dots and here's a napkin with little baby chicks, here's a napkin 
with stars and stripes. Just always trying to make things special and nice. That's what she 
did. And that's what I wanted to do for my family. 

I had forgotten about the napkins until she said something. Those same napkins kept in 

the drawer of the Grandma Cabinet in the dining room growing up.  

And as we talked more, we started to reflect on these care tasks, this way that Grandma 

seemed to almost run herself into the ground with caring, but how it felt different, maybe, than 

her own mother where those care tasks almost started to feel like performance more than 

anything. And while we both think that there might have some skewed moral standard that 

affected my grandma’s constant strive to do and do and go and go and care and care, there was 

something deeper going on.  

I remember saying, “It’s about love, isn’t it.” 

I think it may truly be about love.  

*** 

When I was over at their house this last time, when I did the interviews and everything 

went wrong – the memory card ran out of space halfway through and so I started recording on 

my phone, with terrible audio, my grandparents going in and out of frame – I found this shaky 

footage where I talked about my memories of being in the sewing room as a child and how I 

would play with buttons. For hours and hours I would sit on the floor and sort them and organize 

them like different pieces of candy and how I remembered one specific button that looked like a 

peppermint.  

 119 

 
As I told this story, I could tell my grandma didn’t remember what I was talking about. 

She found a tin filled with other sewing supplies and offered it to me – is this it? Grandpa said no 

before digging through the cabinet behind him to pull out the exact tin I remember from when I 

was a kid, full to the brim with buttons.  

I don’t sew anymore, said Grandma.  

We opened up the tin and there they were, all the same buttons I remembered. As if no 

time had passed, the collection hadn’t changed, untouched. 

Dump it, said Grandpa, indicating for me to pour them out onto the table for me to see 

better. I went through and touched all of them, the feeling deeply familiar as I ran my hand 

across the pile.  

I found the peppermint, said Grandpa.  

I exclaimed how it was my favorite, my disbelief that they still had that exact button.  

Take it, said Grandma, touching my arm.  

And so I did.  

  Figure 33: the peppermint 

button 

 120 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Bric-a-brac 

By: Dorothy Parker 

Little things that no one needs— 

Little things to joke about— 

Little landscapes, done in beads, 

Little morals, woven out, 

Little wreaths of gilded grass, 

Little brigs of whittled oak 

Bottled painfully in glass; 

These are made by lonely folk. 

Lonely folk have lines of days 

Long and faltering and thin; 

Therefore— little wax bouquets, 

Prayers cut upon a pin, 

Little maps of pinkish lands, 

Little charts of curly seas, 

Little plats of linen strands, 

Little verses, such as these.  

 121 

 
 
 
CHAPTER 6: RHETORICS OF THE SMALL 

What is a rhetoric of the small?  

A feeling, a moment, a thing we can touch?  

A chair, a table, a cabinet? 

A peppermint button?  

Is it all the little things we’ve ever felt in the quiet moments? The way the light comes 

through the window, and you’re all alone, just you? And everything is still.  

…And you start to notice. Notice the way the light catches the steam coming off the top 

of your cup of tea, notice the indistinguishable sounds the house makes around you, and what it 

feels like, in your body, to be in that moment.  

A rhetorics of the small is to notice. It is to be attuned to the body, to the spaces that 

surround us. It is an intentionality in the small things we do and say and surround ourselves with. 

A rhetorics of the small is an argument for the power of little things, for what is near, for the 

impressions we leave. It is an argument for the way the small things impact the big things, our 

cultures, communities, and social worlds. It is tied to how memory works, how little things 

accumulate in our minds and become part of a whole – in the stories we tell, the way we make 

meaning – the details that are often lost to time, despite holding the potential for the deepest 

meaning.  

For my sister, her ideas of form and function are tied deeply to the question of how things 

come to matter in our lives – the cyclical nature of objects, meaning, and human interaction. 

Things come to matter because people matter, our interactions with others and how we want to 

create spaces for others. The stories that objects hold are stories of other people, and our familiar, 

repeated interactions with those objects over time begin to leave impressions, on us, on the 

 122 

objects themselves -- like how a chair begins to take our shape. As we shape our spaces, our 

spaces shape us.  

For my mother, her sense of the abstract and the practical have guided her to see how 

place functions in our lives – from the small scale of the home to the large scale of the globe. Her 

process of making things beautiful and simple and practical is her way of orienting herself to the 

spaces and places she is in, and that her experiences in leaving and returning tell us something 

about what it is to become situated in the world, to have a sense of direction, and to learn to see 

and appreciate the simple.  

For my grandmother, the visible and invisible effects of her disease on her body, brain, 

the people around her are important for me, as one of her loved ones, in conceptualizing the 

visible and invisible effects of time itself. The way time and memory function as bodily 

experiences, often unreliable in our experience of them, can often be put in conflict with the 

stories we tell ourselves and others. My grandma spent so much of her time making things 

beautiful, creating spaces that were special, and passing these ideas down to her children and 

their children. She showed us, step by step, the things she knew by heart, and now as they fade 

with the effects of the disease on her body, it is our turn to do the same.  

Finding a definition of the rhetorics of the small is to acknowledge the specific stories, 

patterns, and details within each of these women’s lives while specifically not being limited to 

these women’s lives. A rhetoric of the small is for all of us, a collection of stories that make up 

the call for attention and attunement to the little things that so often go overlooked.  

*** 

In chapter 1, at the very beginning of this project, I talk about life-worlds. A life-world, 

according to scholars like Husserl, is the foundational space in which we live and make meaning 

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– it is the background, the thing taken for granted as the horizon from which our experiences are 

born. I argue for the home as a small-scale version of the lifeworld – a concept that becomes 

background, something that shapes our individual experiences. Our experience of “home” itself 

differs wildly, home as a specific location or multiple locations, home as a country, state, city, or 

specific dwelling, home as a positive, safe place to return to or as related to negative, difficult or 

even dangerous situations, people, and experiences. Not all people are safe in their homes or 

have access to safe and livable dwelling places. But these experiences, memories, and feelings 

toward current or past homes have indeed directly shaped our experiences of the world and 

where we go from here. In the same way we as human beings were all born, we all come from 

somewhere, grew up somewhere, live somewhere now – this is an intrinsic part of the human 

experience, while the situations behind these experiences can vary drastically.  

The life-world, as a foundation for human experience, according to Moran’s introduction 

to Husserl, “cannot be transcended” (2012, p. 181). It is innate, immanent. We are thus, limited 

to our bodies, limited to our experiences in those bodies, and situated in the world in a very 

specific way that shapes what and how we learn and grow before we begin our own process of 

shaping the world around us. Our bodies, the places we dwell, and the experience of time, all 

limit us in some capacity, and yet they are also the way through which we make meaning and 

shape worlds. It is through our sensing bodies, situated with space and time, that we come to 

know.  

*** 

The Hand 

Olivia reaches out once again, to the keys of the piano, her fingers learning more and 

more every time she plays. She reaches for the ingredients in the back room of the coffee shop 

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where she bakes a couple of times a week, knowing the correct measurements by heart now. The 

dough for the scones she’s making are bright purple from the berries, her hands are sure. They’ve 

always been sure.  

Merleau-Ponty describes habituality as “knowledge in the hands,” a primordial 

knowledge, something fundamental. Habits and repeated actions are therefore a primary way in 

which we come to understand embodied knowing and how bodies home to shape our experience 

of the world. Heidegger’s concept of ready-to-hand exemplifies how some of this habituality and 

embodied knowledge is linked to our experience of the things around us – what our hands do and 

touch based on what is near, what is familiar. Our hands are incredibly linked to what it is to be 

in the world, to shape the world, to reach and touch and feel.  

I asked my dad to draw a set of hands on a 

piece of paper while I was home in Texas. My dad 

was always incredible at drawing anything set in 

front of him, so I watched as he drew his own hand, 

and mine that was sitting next to his on the table. He 

drew quickly, his right hand moving with surety as 

Figure 34: Knowledge in the hands 

we chatted about his day at work. His left hand laid idle for him to catch the shapes and lines 

created over years, his wedding ring, the size of his hand compared to mine.  

I thought of Olivia’s tattoo of a hand, reaching. Reaching out for something… I don’t 

quite know what.  

The Eye 

My mother zooms in once again on the tiniest of details on the map she’s editing. The 

way the bridge goes over the river doesn’t look right in the bottom right corner of the print. She 

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always jokes about finally working as a full-time artist right when her vision starts to fade – 

needing special glasses and lighting in order to properly see the painting in front of her. But she 

still sees the detail better than anyone I know – catching the tiniest imperfections. Knowing 

exactly what color should go where to make the artwork balanced, pleasing to the eye.  

In Donna Haraway’s (1988) situated knowledges, she talks about this idea of “learning to 

see” in an attempt to reclaim vision as an embodied, sensory act, instead of a “conquering gaze 

from nowhere,” or a transcendent, omnipotent view of observation in the world (p. 581). She 

says:  

“We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with […] vision, […] in order to name where 
we are and are not… [O]bjectivity turns out to be about particular and specific 
embodiment and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence of all 
limits and responsibility. The moral is simple: only partial perspective promises objective 
vision. […] Feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge, not 
about transcendence and splitting of subject and object. It allows us to become 
answerable for what we learn how to see.” (1988, p. 582-583).  

I like thinking about this idea of situated knowledges in conversation with Ahmed’s 

concept of “orientation” in Queer Phenomenology (2006), and how we come to know through 

becoming oriented and disoriented as bodies in space, and as social beings navigating our place 

in the world. The eye is a clear tool of orientation (and disorientation) in how we come to be 

situated in a space, and how we come to find our way through the embodiment of sight – like a 

sense of embodied direction when we look at and experience a map.  

The Heart 

There was something about her that felt like it was at the center – the lifeblood behind it 

all. Her imperfections and insecurities and outbursts and unspoken histories were all there, 

brimming and bleeding onto her children, her grandchildren. But a center, nonetheless. 

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Something that held together. She could make anything, sew anything. She read, she gardened, 

she chased cars down the neighborhood road she thought were going too fast. She was there.  

She was. She is?  

There and not there, visible and invisible. 

What is at the essence of things? Phenomenology, in its origins, was similar to other 

philosophical endeavors in its quest for truth. And while often this quest for truth was situated in 

a quest for better understanding the essence of things, I find essence to be the more compelling 

of the two. Essence is the core property of something, often hidden from our immediate sight. 

It’s a thing’s intrinsic-ness, the heart. I find, when we look to for the essence of things, we find 

their heart often lies in how it connects to our own hearts, our own core. At the heart of my 

grandmother’s house was my grandmother herself, and at the heart of my grandmother we find 

something that lasts beyond the singularity of her physical body/brain – something about 

memory, life… love? I think it might be love.  

*** 

I often go back to the story in chapter 4 of my mother on the plane when she was in 

college, looking down on the West Texas landscape. The big things are like the small things.  

The first time I encountered the idea of fractals was in the book Emergent strategy by 

adrienne maree brown (2017), where she uses the concept of fractals to discuss the relationships 

between the small and the large. “A fractal,” she says, “is a never-ending pattern. Fractals are 

infinitely complex patterns that are self-similar across different scales. They are created by 

repeating a simple process over and over in an ongoing feedback loop” (brown, 2017, p. 51). It is 

a mathematical term that can be seen in nature in snowflakes, the branches of trees, ferns, 

broccoli, lightning storms – repeated patterns, branching out at scale, over and over and over. 

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With a fractal, regardless of how zoomed in or out you are, every part looks similar to the whole 

image.13 My mother, in her love of maps and scale and patterns, didn’t know she was thinking of 

fractals, didn’t know about the mathematical intricacies involved in her seeing shapes in the 

landscape below her as a 20-something in college.  

The big things are like the small things.  

brown uses fractals to ultimately argue that “how we are at the small scale is how we are 

at the large scale” (p. 52). This is quite the argument, embedded in the idea of the relationships, 

connections, and connectivity between the personal and the cultural/social. She continues, “The 

patterns of the universe repeat at scale. There is a structural echo that suggests two things: one, 

that there are shapes and patterns fundamental to our universe, and two, that what we practice at 

a small scale can reverberate to the largest scale” (p. 52). This structural echo is what I believe 

my mother saw from the plane, what I believe she is encapsulating in her maps. But I like how 

brown takes it a step further, beyond the idea of the small and large being connected, but about 

how we ultimately value the effects of the small things (our daily practices, the objects and 

movements of the everyday), as they reverberate, echo towards the big things (relationships, 

culture, histories, power).  

The patterns we create in our daily lives have much larger consequences, and thus, to 

think about large-scale transformative change we must often first start with the small. brown’s 

book title, Emergent Strategy, is a concept she defines as “strategy for building complex patterns 

and systems of change through relatively small interactions” (2017, p. 2). This, in many ways, is 

the point of the book, this acknowledgement of the everyday, the small, the simple, as valuable in 

13 Internal Technologies. (n.d.) What is a fractal? https://iternal.us/what-is-a-
fractal/#:~:text=A%20Fractal%20is%20a%20type,many%20different%20aspects%20of%20life.  

 128 

 
the way they can intentionally shape, change, and transform the world at large. Emergence, she 

says, “emphasizes critical connections over critical mass, building authentic relationships, 

listening with all the senses of the body and the mind” (2017, p. 3). Connection is what is most 

valuable in this process – not only the connection between the big and the small, but our 

connections with each other. Thus, a rhetorics of the small is an inherently relational practice, 

just as it is a sensory practice, outlined by brown’s discussion of listening with all the senses. Our 

attunement to our bodies and sensory experiences are what allow us to ultimately connect and 

relate to the world around us, and thus, the other people that we come in contact within the 

world.   

I read brown’s book while I was home in Texas interviewing my family, at a time when I 

had all of these ideas for this project and how I was going to interview my sister, mom, and 

grandmother, but still ultimately lacking a sense of real focus – what was the point of this 

project? It felt like something hidden, something I had to search for, dig for, that was right 

underneath the surface. I was searching for something that was on the tip of my tongue, right… 

there.  

Why did it matter?  

And something about what I saw in brown’s book felt like an answer, in that it was one of 

the few books I had read in a while that offered… action. I know plenty of books situate, 

theorize, and call for change and new ways of thinking in ways that are incredibly action 

oriented. I believe books do something, often by just being books – they are ways of creating 

new knowledge. But something different happened to me when reading brown’s book – one of 

the clearest articulations of why this, any of this, matters. For me, citing home as theory, home as 

a site of rhetorical knowledge production, the relationship between the personal and theoretical, 

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the feminist call for an anti-logocentric viewpoint of rhetorical meaning-making, reflecting on 

the importance of the relationships between bodies, space, and time – these things matter to me 

as they stand, but it is often difficult to simply and concisely mark the reasoning of what we 

might do with them. brown’s discussion of emergence and scale allowed me to zoom out – the 

patterns we hold at the small reverberate to the large. The meaning we find in our home has 

direct effects on how we find meaning elsewhere, the daily practices of our lives matter, they are 

not simply background noise that allow us to do other things that matter more. The home, in its 

representation of the small, the everyday, is a starting point for change.  

*** 

My husband and I received the wonderful news that I was pregnant a couple of months 

into writing this dissertation. I had always been fascinated by the concept of pregnancy – a true 

embodiment, the way our mothers carried us in their bodies, made home for us in their bodies. It 

always seemed larger than life to me, difficult to process the enormity of motherhood and 

childbearing, but while actually being pregnant, I was surprised at the… normalcy of it. It’s true 

that when I stopped to think about the enormity of it, what it would feel like to be a parent, I was 

struck by the weight of the whole process, but as far as the everyday experience goes, it was 

rather ordinary. Nine months is a long time and change happens slowly. I read a lot about how 

the baby developed every week and while it was absolutely incredible, it was still just something 

that happens, something occurring day by day that you can’t yet see or feel. Day after day.  

And then, without warning, he was here.  

I had just finished the first draft of this project and sent it off to my committee only a 

week a two before my water broke unexpectedly five weeks early of my due date, the night 

before I was supposed to have my baby shower. Up until that my point my pregnancy had been 

 130 

decently uneventful, so it was a shock to suddenly be in the hospital knowing my baby would be 

there in a couple of hours. And when he did arrive, crying and purple and wriggly, the first thing 

they did was lay him on my chest and I got to hold his tiny, tiny hand.  

He ended up needing to spend seven days in the NICU and there were so many moments 

where my husband and I were absolutely terrified – oxygen levels and ambulances and breathing 

tubes and alarms and the constant beeping of machines, as we sat and watch the rises and falls of 

our baby’s tiny chest.  

In and out.  

My parents and my sister had flown up from Texas, and they were able to sit with me 

next to his incubator and bring us food and just take care of all the little things that we hadn’t 

been able to do with the suddenness of his arrival. My mother and sister, especially, took over 

finishing setting up our apartment before we brought him home. They deep cleaned, and 

reorganized shelves and took emergency trips to Target, and I realized I couldn’t imagine trusting 

anyone else but the two of them to set up a space that worked for us. I had so many grandiose 

plans of getting everything ready before his due date, but in the end, I just needed my mom. I 

needed the way both her and my sister share that quality that allows them to just jump into 

action, shaping the spaces around them to make them work, make them fit. 

The idea of the “small things” took on a new meaning. My tiny boy – all four pounds of 

him – his tiny hands and toes. His tiny breaths, tiny sighs. The little ways our families cared for 

us. The little details I remember from that time – a tiger blanket, banana bread, a nurse named 

Stephanie, a ‘welcome home’ sign. These small things that seem to stick in my mind, as if my 

brain knows they’re important, somehow.  

 131 

And then, flashing forward however many months later to a fully happy and healthy 

baby, it is still the little things that get to me. We’ve gotten into somewhat of a routine, though it 

still seems always be changing, and I’m struck by how even what once felt miraculous has 

started to feel mundane. He breathes, he sleeps, he eats, and then we do it all over again. Even 

now I hear him playing in the other room and as I write I know I’ll have to stop soon to go make 

sure he’s fed and then help get him down for a nap. My sense of time itself has changed, the way 

my body adjusts (or doesn’t adjust) to lack of sleep, or how it’s attuned to his needs (or not 

attuned, when I can’t figure out what he needs). The back and forth of my daily life, not really 

getting much work done, and feeling stressed before remembering that this little human relies on 

me and the people around me for quite literally everything. As he grows more independent things 

will continue to change, but for now I will continue to simply orbit him as if gravity itself turns 

me towards every little sound he makes, every movement, every cry.  

Is this motherhood? I’ve talked with some other mothers in my life about how I’m still 

not sure what being a mother is supposed to feel like. Many of them have expressed to me that 

that feeling of not knowing is what it feels like, especially at the beginning. There is a strange 

comradery in motherhood as we acknowledge the individuality of each person’s experience but 

how that individuality is almost what brings the sense of community, the sense of 

acknowledgement from others who have experienced all the range of what it can mean to be a 

parent. I feel this sense of discovery, alongside friends and family, is what helps me feel 

connected to the experience of others that came before me, this continued pattern across 

generations as we help bring these strange little beings into this world.  

And it’s this that makes me feel as though this dissertation wouldn’t be complete without 

him, this baby that made me a mother, a mere concept in my mind as I wrote my first draft but 

 132 

now here, flesh and blood, little hands reaching and needing and holding. In some ways this 

dissertation is about him, how connected he is for me to what I mean when I say “rhetorics of the 

small” – to what it means to love across time and space, to be attuned to our bodies, to hold 

things close, to sit within the mundane and the everyday as significant in what sticks out, little 

pinpricks in our brains that tell us that this matters, don’t forget.  

*** 

I had a conversation with my mother after completing my first draft of the chapter about 

my grandmother. I told her about how difficult it was to try and convey the horror of Alzheimer’s 

disease and what had already been lost to time, while still ultimately retaining the hope of what it 

is to love and be loved in homes that are gone and homes that are still here with us. And the 

conversation turned to something like grief hitting my mother out of nowhere – it’s just not fair, 

she said.  

“She worked her ass off to make everything beautiful and special and safe – a welcoming 

and safe place, and I’ve lost that,” she said. “I can’t call my mom anymore, I used to call her 

about everything. She was the person that actually cared…”  

Loss is a funny thing. We can know these truths by heart, we can know the truth of what 

we lost, we can feel it with every breath, but sometimes it will hit us when we least expect it. I 

was telling my mom about the chapter to celebrate my writing skills, to commiserate on the 

difficulty of the dissertation work and in that moment my mom realized that she lost the ability 

to call her own mother and talk about the highs and the lows of just everyday life.  

“I don’t have my mom anymore,” I remember her saying.  

But then she told me a story.  

 133 

She explained how my grandmother comes over to my mother’s house every Thursday 

morning while my grandpa goes to a weekly bible study meeting that my mom insists he go to in 

order to get out of the house. When my grandmother arrives at the door early on Thursday, my 

mother says she apologizes every time. “Sorry it’s so early.” “Sorry for bothering you.”  

And my mom, without fail, says, “It’s no bother,” or “I would be up anyway.”  

And on this particular morning, my grandmother made a comment about the amount of 

Christmas decorations that were sitting around in my mother’s house – there were bins and boxes 

and garland strewn about the whole house – “you have too many Christmas decorations.” 

And my mom responded, “I get that from you.” 

My grandma looked surprised. 

“When I was little, I would come home from school and you had transformed the whole 

house. The Christmas tree was up and lit, and it always felt like every inch of the house was 

covered in holly or snowmen or miniature Santa’s.” 

My mother said my grandmother seemed to smile, not necessarily remembering, but as if 

she seemed to think the idea was nice. And my mother told me that she likes to do that when 

she’s with my grandmother – remind her of the beautiful things. 

“I think that’s why I’m here,” she said.  

And I can’t remember if I just thought it or if I said it out loud, but is that what it is to 

love someone? Saying something true over and over again, knowing they won’t remember?  

But we do it because it matters, still. Whether they remember or not.  

Over and over and over.  

*** 

I think my grandmother would matter if no one ever wrote about her.  

 134 

I say this because it’s a possible misconstruction embedded in my theorization of the 

rhetorics of the small as a call for the small to be remembered – to be archived, cherished, 

brought into new life through text, unlike the women in generations past who we have long 

forgotten. We’ve forgotten the way they would lean down to teach their young daughter how to 

do something in the kitchen. We’ve forgotten the words spoken in the quiet moments that no one 

wrote down but were still a part of shaping and changing how generations moved through space 

and thought and loved and wrote.  

The unknown names in history, the forgotten.  

But I think, for me, a rhetorics of the small is not in fact, a call of remembrance. I think 

about the stories that little things have, stories we tell each other, moments of the quiet and 

unnoticed that will be lost to time if they haven’t been already – do they still matter? If no one 

remembers them, do they still matter? 

Because I often wonder if these small things are more embedded in us than we realize. 

How are the small things are passed down? What if we carry them in our bodies, what if we pass 

them to the next generation in a way that is embodied, embedded – a type of essence? We might 

not remember our great-great-great grandmother’s name if we don’t look it up on an ancestry 

website, we might not find meaning in the stories we hear about her, if we hear stories at all, this 

woman we never met. But she matters, still. If only for the simple fact that we would not exist 

without her.  

To quote Petra Hendry, "Memory is not mere nostalgia or sentimental reminiscence, but 

an interpretative, political, and creative engagement that asks us to question: what does it mean 

to be human? How do we know? Who can be knower? What is knowledge?" (2011, p. 4) 

 135 

A rhetoric of the small is not, therefore, some idealist retreat into the falsehoods of 

nostalgia, but rather a call – in light of real horrors in the world, of anger and the pain, and broad 

sense of being overwhelmed, that we turn to the small. That we remember the importance of the 

everyday, the importance of breath and simply being in the world. That we let it ground us, back 

into our bodies, and bring to light what we value and how we make sense of the world – how we 

come to know.  

*** 

A rhetorics of the small is ultimately concerned with love.  

In brown’s book she has an interesting passage where she talks about the larger function 

of little things that dandelions and mushrooms within the larger ecosystem as ‘toxin-

transformers’ and ‘communities of healers,’ in order to ask, then, “What are we as humans, what 

is our function in the universe?” 

This is what she says: 

“One thing I have observed: When we are engaged in acts of love, we humans are at our 
best and most resilient. The love in romance that makes us want to be better people, the 
love of children that makes us change our whole lives to meet their needs, the love of 
family that makes us drop everything to take care of them, the love of community that 
makes us work tirelessly with broken hearts.  

Perhaps humans’ core function is love. Love leads us to observe in a much deeper way 
than any other emotion” (2017, p. 9). 

It is love that allows us to see. It is love that calls us to pay attention, to notice, to bring forward 

to the surface what was once overlooked. It is love that causes the small things to matter, causes 

the mundane to become beautiful, become meaningful, become embedded into our very bones, a 

story written in our bodies. It is love in my hands as I hold my son, it is love in my voice as I talk 

to my mother and sister on the phone, it is love that holds the memories of my grandmother 

 136 

 
 
close, as I walk through her kitchen in Lubbock (or am I in Gladewater?) and right through the 

front door. I am in Lubbock, East Texas, Celina, Belize, Michigan.  

I am home.  

*** 

Years before we got married, my husband and I went on a walk. I was writing a paper for 

a writing workshop class with Alexandra Hidalgo, the paper that would inspire this dissertation 

project, the paper that itself was inspired from papers I had written during my master’s degree at 

Texas Tech about my mom’s maps, papers written in my first semester at MSU about 

homemaking as cultural practice and embodiment storytelling. My husband and I have gone on 

many walks now, braving the cold or the wind or the sun to walk through the forested path across 

the street from our apartment, where I would rant and rave wildly about my vague and chaotic 

thoughts and ideas, and my husband would listen, asking the occasional question. This walk was 

one of the first, on a snowy evening in February, when the question he asked pulled something 

loose, made something come together in my mind, and I saw it all in that moment – why my 

grandmother mattered, why my mother and sister’s stories mattered, how tied they were to mine. 

This was the moment it all clicked.  

What about it makes you bleed? he asked.  

It was a strange question, but I knew what he meant. We were walking in the snow; my 

shoe was untied. The sky looked dark pink, almost orange and the trees were a deep gray. There 

was an unintended violence in the question that I didn’t feel – he was asking me to call to 

language what was already in my shoulders, behind my ears. Bring it forward.  

 137 

There’s a string tied around the part of my stomach, just behind my lungs. It’s both 

pulling me and pushing me, and sometimes just... there. Anchoring me, connecting me to them, 

to you.  

I pull just hard enough to hurt.  

My grandmother, sitting in her chair. She’s showing me how to pinch off the ends of the 

green beans from the garden. My mother is painting. Her brush swirls in the water after each 

stroke, creating new colors every time. My sister is playing the piano. She seems to always be 

playing the piano, filling the house with sound. 

The sound of my feet crunching through snow, through the fading light of the Michigan 

winter echo this ongoing beat in my chest. Bleeding, bursting out from the very core of my heart, 

running freely and wildly in their warmth and in their power, they matter, the small things.  

They matter, they matter, they matter.  

 138 

 
 
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