Continuing the theme of light fixtures...

But also: when we first saw the house, even before we decided to make an offer, I spotted a tantalizing curl of yellowing paint barely clinging to the parlor ceiling, and in the empty plaster space where it once fit, the faintest suggestion of a line. A leaf? A scroll? Were the parlor ceilings of solidly-middle class townhouses ever painted, even? I went home that night and researched, but could find nothing.

After we bought the house and began the work of restoring it I thought that I could occasionally make out some geometric regularity in the texture of the ceiling. Then again, the ceiling was very bumpy. And also, I wanted it to be there, the way I wanted to lift a floorboard and find some 19th century shoes (all I ever found was a marble, quite old, and a nudie pic, not quite as old.)

Then a brutal summer storm blew the little skylight off and the rain poured in, soaking through the upstairs floorboards and into the parlor ceiling. And then a few days later we came downstairs in the morning to find the desk, the rug, the instruments, all covered in white confetti. Overnight the paint had fallen like snow or ash. And there it was, faded by age and preserved through the mixed blessing of neglect: a delicate painted motif.

The paint keeps falling periodically. We are resolved to let gravity do the work for us: we're in no rush, it's survived this long.