The Doll House
My great-uncle died back in April. I visited my family in Maryland for his viewing. This was a month before I came out and I wrote about it at the time. I shopped this piece with no luck so I'm sticking it here.... My grandfather built doll houses for the girls in his life: one each for his daughters and one for his granddaughter. He did not build one for me. He did not know I am a girl. He died not knowing this. I come from a family of builders, their fingerprints quite literally on famous edifices from the Biltmore Mansion in Asheville, North Carolina to Oriole Park at Camden Yards in Baltimore, Maryland. This skill eluded me; about the only creative gift I have to offer the world is the written word. Yet I was always impressed by my grandfather's ingenuity: the smoothness of his angles, the minute details of the window frames. No doubt this was handed down from generation-to-generation. My grandfather's brother recently died, having outlived his two yo...