A La Ronde's Center 'Kaleidoscope'

A bird’s eye view in miniature
of six alleyways in a sixteen sided house, Alice may have wandered down
following her White Rabbit.
Or so it seems looking into this mirrored orb defended by a bronze forged swallow

Each room is built like the tricky layers in pastry
Imagine a diamond turned slowly on its axis, each stop becomes a set in this home’s drama.
A small sunroom to visit the gardens while holding hands with the indoors.
The parlor, reserved for calls with acquaintances no one expected to stay long.
The butler’s pantry has a rotund iron belly stove——equipped with an intimidatingly large
onyx iron dumbwaiter.
Its elephantine wheel behind glass in the top bedroom wall.

In the music room, I casually played a few Hanon piano exercises, making the docent’s day.
Years before the residents could play circles around that.
Make the walls gleam with starred ribbons of Bach’s Minuet.
They conjured soothing works of Chopin and Liszt’s Nocturne to snake like reverent guardians through their night rooms.
Or parade Beethoven’s later works when angst befell them.
Music spread bleeding like oil slicks across the keys.
These sounds grew more jagged in tone as if they shared fighting back with life as he did his increasing deafness.

She said no one ever actually played it.
Such quiet in a house once lived in must be haunting.

The library was split into two, an embossed mahogany desk whose literature neighbors (the books) joked amongst themselves in glass-front cases.

The twin library was a forgotten cubby. Books of every shape, width, and finish were crammed—in neat lines that got distracted, leaned sideways and then piled on top of each other.
They reminded me of playing in leaves when I was a girl.
It looked like how cats play in paper bags.
A frisky Jack in the Box had gotten loose, and lost his place in one of these novels…fairytales or poems. If only he could remember which.
“In the Round” both worldly and homestead singular. Eccentric collector charm and wanderlust sprawl rally here at the center.