SEPTEMBER 7, 2020 – The time of Covid has brought some silver linings. One is more old-fashioned, unstructured play by kids in the neighborhood. Instead of being carted off to dance class, soccer practice, and Taekwondo, kids are playing hopscotch on the sidewalks and riding their bikes up and down the street. Their shouts and laughter are a welcome distraction from . . . the news.
So are the gnome villages that have cropped up along our neighborhood boulevards. These have become quite the rage, and I like how the miniaturization of life can overshadow, for a time at least, the imponderables of our current age.
When our nearly-five-year-old granddaughter visits, our activities include invariably a walk (in her case, a run) down the sidewalk to check out the latest additions to local, well-established gnome settlements. The dwellings are especially intriguing. A distinctive architectural style has developed. I call it “Gaudí-Gnome,” since much of it mimics the phantasmagorical designs by the famous Catalan architect, Anotoni Gaudí i Cornet. Unlike the “McColonial Mansion” architecture of many newer American suburbs, no two abodes of the Gaudí-Gnome School are alike.All Categories
My wife and I kept this salient trait of originality in mind when we constructed our own gnome houses over the weekend. What started out as a project for our granddaughter’s amusement soon became the source of our own delight.
Up here at the Red Cabin, we’re surrounded by unlimited supplies of gnome-home building materials—stones, mosses, birchbark, pinecones, and all kinds of wood. These reflect another key feature of the Gaudí-Gnome School of architecture: the use of local, natural, unrefined building materials.
But after harvesting our building supplies, my wife and I took radically different approaches to construction. Within a half hour, she’d finished no fewer than three houses and placed them strategically in her garden in front of the cabin. By the time she’d rounded up a couple of miniature bears—one “bare,” the other in full fishing regalia—from their dens on a shelf of an antique cabinet inside and placed them in her gnome village, I was still getting underway on my single gnome home.
By the time I completed my first gnome home four hours later, my wife was comparing our gnome homes not to Gaudí’s Casa Vicens or Palau Güell but to the houses of The Three Little Pigs—hers to the houses of sticks and straw, mine to the house of bricks. The comparison was probably apt, given that she’d constructed her moss-à-birchbark houses with scissors but without the use of a single fastener, while I’d used a hardware store’s worth of tools and multiple varieties of nails. (Nonetheless, the decorative moss atop my sturdy birchbark roof blew clear across the yard when the next day’s wind huffed and puffed.)
If my gnome home could be labeled “Casa Solìd” (not to be confused with the mathematical term, “Catalan solid,” named after a Belgian), my wife’s village could be aptly called, Gnomique Matisse—a few strokes of genius and Voilá! . . . you are in the midst of a village far, far away.
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© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
