Through countless relocations and abrupt changes in fortune, my mother has taken the same room with her wherever she goes, like a life-long work-in- progress--a traveling exhibition that she dismantles piece by piece, folds up, and packs along with her other possessions, unwrapping it when she arrives at her destination and painstakingly reinstalling it in a reassuringly familiar form.

She has never had the luxury of sampling the full range of contemporary "lifestyles." She therefore does not view her living room as a way of trying out different identities. She rejects the idea that one is fully in charge of one's destiny, and embraces instead an essentially static conception of herself. She sees both her room and her life as intrinsically resistant to change--from the pewter vase that her neighbors gave her decades ago to the battered copy of Mangled Manners, a farcical book of etiquette, which has remained on her coffee table for over 25 years.

Although Mother's room is in many ways a typical little old lady's room, with its embroidered pillows, multi-colored afghans and porcelain figurines--things that reflect an anachronistic kind of feminine daintiness--the aesthetic philosophy behind her housekeeping and methods of organization is far from simple.

In contrast to conventionally "decorated" rooms, which are created in one prohibitively expensive act of remodelling, Mother's room, with its forests of gaudy souvenirs and its priceless rubbish of irreplaceable trinkets and children's art, evolved over a much longer period of time. Instead of testifying to the infallible judgment and fine taste of its occupant, it betrays an extreme lack of originality and personal choice. It is filled instead with the choices of her friends and family: the gaping-mouthed ceramic fish given to my sister Lee by her third-grade art teacher; the gnarled piece of driftwood painted with an underwater scene, a gift from an obese neighbor; and the obscene, phallic-shaped gourd that Lynn's roommate grew and that Mother coarsely refers to as "a woman's best friend."

Yet although Mother is unaware of the way in which she inscribes her distinctive signature into her surroundings, her inexpensive decor is suffused in all of its details with both her history and psychology. Her room is a shrine to a bygone, preindustrial era, filled with with crocheted fabrics, wicker baskets, antique grandfather clocks, rocking chairs and figurines made out of corn husks, objects intended to restore contact with an old self--the woman she was in her youth before she became a typical Middle American housewife.