Adri Woehler’s Reviews > Coventry: Essays > Status Update

the stairs are virtually impassable with the possessions that have accumulated there, the books and clothes and toys, the violins and satchels and football boots, all precipitously stacked as if in a vertical lost property office; the children's rooms are so neglected they have acquired a kind of wilderness beauty, like untouched landscapes where over time the processes of growth and decay have created their own organic forms. In the kitchen, the children make volcano cakes or create chemical explosions; somewhere in the upper regions of the house, a singing teacher leads the older ones in hollering out show tunes; in the corridors, there is always a multitude of friends and pets and hangers-on milling around. One day a hamster got out of its cage; it was found six months later, living happily with a brood of offspring in a wardrobe. My friend looks at it all with mock despair, then waves it away with her hand. If that's how they want to live, she says, then let them.
In this house, the search for happiness appears to be complete; or rather, in the chaotic mountain of jumble it is always somehow at hand, the easiest of all things to find. The foreground is entirely human here: the rooms may have been neglected, but the people haven't been.
It is clear to me that by eradicating the tension of the material, my friend has been able to give her children exactly what she wanted to give them - love, authority, the right advice - where for other people these things got mixed up and snagged on one another.