It’s interesting that the concept of the “family bed” is being revived in the second millennium among young parents. Is it any coincidence that this is happening alongside multiple private quarters and the demise of the “family room”? The now defunct family room implied that family members had to reach a consensus about what to do together. It has been replaced by an open “great room,” in which family members may pursue individual pursuits. Today’s living quarters, it seems, are about accommodating different lifestyles and schedules. We build our homes for privacy and individuality, then we must invent “new” ideas like the family bed as a way to retrieve old-fashioned feelings of togetherness.
Fingerprints are another old-fashioned thing that was banished in the immaculate modern home. Our homes already have family fingerprints all over them, says author/photographer Mary Randolph Carter, whose classic American Family Style captures nostalgic lifestyles. Carter speaks of a spiritual concept that can be expressed on many levels in our homes themselves: cooking, gardening, and entertaining.
Hallways, notorious for family fingerprints, are a case in point. One young mom capitalized on this, helping her kids make hand prints all over the corridor walls, each with different colors of paint. Each year she adds a few more with their slightly larger hands or adds the hand of a toddler just joining the display. The hallway in her home has become a collage of family history.
No doubt the corridor is here to stay. Those of us who have lived in college dormitories will never forget late evenings when everybody gathered in the hail to swap gossip or to share funny stories, poetry, class research, notes, or papers. The corridor was a place to reconnect on an intimate level, the way you couldn’t connect anywhere else on campus. Doors ajar, rooms with comfy beds and chairs went begging when pajama-clad kids sat cross- legged on the floor just to hang out.

Today each family member seems to take for granted the right to a room of his or her own and a corridor by which to access it. We guard our right to personal space, free of intrusion. Many kids today have their own telephones, televisions, and personal computers in their bedrooms. The latest custom homes equip each bedroom with its own bathroom as well; master suites may have two flu bathrooms. Such homes are, in fact, lavish palaces replete with suites that make it possible to live in isolation.
With architecture facilitating independence and a demand for more space instead of sharing what we have, has the family gained or lost? is it unreasonable to expect family members to take turns in a single shower? Is it unfair to have to put up with a sibling snoring in the same room or even in the same bed? Has something gone missing?
I wonder.
Apparently I’m not the only one. The 2002 edition of Frontier House, produced by Public Broadcasting, followed three families who homesteaded 1880s style in the Montana wilderness. After living four months in a one-room cabin they built themselves, one family returned to their 5,000-square-foot home in Malibu with a dramatic realization.The mother found their California house too big, saying she never knew if anybody else was home. Her daughters complained that they were bored since returning to their affluent lifestyle. They spent most of their time at the mall since there was little else to do.The son claimed that he missed spending time with his father where he was included in the work and where he learned to hunt and fish. The father, back to his corporate job, missed the
togetherness of the family sleeping side by side in the cabin loft where there were no walls or corridors to divide them.

Mom and Dad brought me home to Maple Street in a shining- with-hope postwar world. The house was my parents’ first purchase: $3,000 on a veteran’s loan. Daddy built a white picket fence all around it. He had survived D-day and the push into France. Neither crass materialism nor rock ‘n’ roll had yet appeared on the American scene. But the world was a scary place for a pudgy little girl with friy hair and a sensitive soul.
A paw print in the floor of our garage both fascinated and frightened me. Daddy teased that a black bear had ventured by and left his print when the cement was wet. In my three-year-old mind,the bear was still in the neighborhood prowling about and looking for me. Playing in our backyard was not innocent. I hung out close to the back porch or around my mothers ankles in the flower garden, an eye toward the parameters of the picket fence.
Is there a less-than-idyllic situation in your life? What can you do to confront it? What symbol would you use to speak as a testament to your courage? I never did meet the bear on Maple Street, but I’ve faced many bears” since I’ve grown up, and I found them less fearsome than I believed.
Imagined danger or not, life doesn’t always feel safe—even in the most idyllic of places and times. No escape from misfortune is guaranteed. I’ve found, half a century later that the best way to cope with that fact is to live life fully anyway. I keep an eye out for danger not in order to avoid it, but to courageously confront it