Mullis: Folding socks before a work of art

Our house is 500 square feet too small. It’s always been tight, but when my daughter came home from college with all her college things, it became officially cramped. We decided to finish our laundry room, hoping the added storage would help.

While hanging drywall, we decided to leave the cement brick interior wall alone. My husband suggested our daughters paint a mural there.

I loved the idea.

The first time I had seen a mural in a home was while visiting my husband’s cousin in 2006. His wife is an artist and she had painted every flat surface in their house with art.

Some of her pieces were large and realistic, like the seaside mural in their den. It lent a surreal nature to every conversation we had there, as if we were talking by the ocean.

Some were small and whimsical, like a pair of cats floating on a cloud in the corner of a bathroom or the man in the moon grinning from the cable outlet cover.

Every square foot invited a second look, often while doing ordinary things like making coffee or brushing my teeth.

Years later, I read an article about Maud Lewis, a Nova Scotian folk artist who had done something similar. She suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, which curled her hands and made work difficult. She took a post as a maid for a peddler, a man she ended up marrying. She sold Christmas cards and small paintings, which she became known for in the 1960s. It was her house, however, that caught my attention.

Using leftover paint, she created art on every conceivable corner of their small home, including the windows and furniture. The work fascinated me – she was living in her own masterpiece.

My daughters are artists. I have their work framed around my house. My oldest had even decorated a corner cabinet in my kitchen. This time, however, they had a whole wall.

The girls were excited to have a mutual project that didn’t involve shuffling their personal effects to different corners of their overstuffed room.

They decided on a lighthouse scene. They bought paint, sponges, and pencils and shut themselves in the laundry room.

For weeks, I peeked on their progress, watching pencil lines become smears of color and then shape. It delighted me, even if I was folding laundry on the coffee table and hanging sheets on the clothesline and stumbling through a home more crowded than ever.

Music and laughter leaked under the door. Sometimes I heard them singing. Sometimes I heard them bickering. Sometimes I ran errands for more supplies, like metallic lemon – not regular lemon – paint.

My daughters were exacting, obsessed with the depth of the water and the texture of the clouds and the detail of lighthouse railing. They would point out miniature sins to me, but all I saw was beauty.

One day they declared it finished. We crammed into the room and admired it. We took pictures and left the hampers. Their art project was now our laundry room.

My first day of doing laundry in there, I kept stopping and staring. It was wonderful but felt odd. No one was going to see their mural unless they were folding socks.

But to do ordinary things amid the extraordinary – that was the point.

Nicole L.V. Mullis is the author of “A Teacher Named Faith.” You can reach her at nlvm.columns@gmail.com or www.NicoleLVMullis.com.