There are lots of ways we are each unique, including ways where some people have a talent or an ability to do things that others mostly do not. Or many have the ability and few do not, and the lack is considered a handicap. An easy example is being able to carry a tune. It doesn't have to be perfect pitch. I consider that so rare that it must be a talent. I lack it, having a fairly decent relative pitch instead. In choirs I sometimes needed to be reminded by a director who did have perfect pitch that I needed to bring mine either up or down just a tiny bit, as mine was a voice others would follow. Just loud, maybe, but at least able to carry harmony. But I've known someone who'd look at me as if I were deliberately injecting chaos into their life by being a teensy bit off of perfect.
We're no longer friends. It's not a standard I can meet.
I know two separate family groupings with no sense of pitch whatsoever. I get invited to family birthday parties. In both those families I absolutely dread the birthday song. Everybody starts on a different note, wanders all over, rising and falling at random individually, and never where the song does. I do my best to find and maintain a melody but its impossible. It's excruciating. It's a relief when it's over and nobody follows with another verse of "How old are you?" Perhaps they are blessed that they so lack the ear for music that they seem to have no idea how they sound... or don't. Just smile, blow out the candles now and cut the cake!!! Ice cream, anybody?
There's another example where I seem to have an ability others don't. I'm not sure what to call it, but it's a kind of spatial sense. Moving, house hunting, and house selling are pointing it out. I dimly knew there were differences in people that I used to just check off to being a lack of imagination. But it's not that.
I can walk into an empty room and see in my mind how I would fill it with furniture. I know where the couch would go, the TV, the recliners, the table and chairs. I can place book cases, a desk, see which wall the bed goes on. The patterns of traffic jump out at me, not just ours but, when we have them, the pet's as well. I know where plants and pictures need to be.
I can even do it from blueprints. When the Shafer house was getting ready to be built, I was given several small sets of blueprints, choices of floor plans. Those were my only choices for the route I was going. I immediately selected one, with the stipulation that they needed to move a wall. Just one, only three feet, making the kitchen narrower and the living room wider. They did, and it's a very comfortable, usable space. The builder, once it was finished, decided he'd add that as an option for his customers. When Steve and I were thinking we'd go for a newly built modular home, which only get done in a factory with preshaped units, we both wound up picking the same design. It was about space, shapes, and traffic flow, and we've lived together and grown old together long enough to know what works for us. When we changed to buying an existing one, it had those basic requirements met, with room for creativity. It also has more space, and together we've arranged the furniture - on paper - and even bought more, and we both know how to direct our moving crew when the time comes for what goes where.
But now we're trying to sell a house, obviously necessary before we can get into the new one. The furniture is packed and stored, the old house empty. Somehow the people going through just can't see bare rooms and see where their own possessions would go, or what they'd need to have to make the space comfortable. (Well, except for one woman who wanted to take out an exterior wall, extending the space with no regard for support and a slight difference in elevation, i.e. falling hazard. She decided her budget wouldn't allow for those changes.) After three weeks of that, our realtor brought in some cute furniture for the living room. Fake plants. Wall art. She sent us photos. The room pops! She changed the MLS listing photos, and suddenly people are making appointments to see the house. Monday will be busy over there. People who just couldn't picture how to use the space are now seeing it.
Even I see it differently. The pieces she used, as I said, are cute. They absolutely do not fit our needs. We can't sit in delicate little chairs with narrow legs which could tip over with a tiny bump. A desk and wall art on the wall opposite the only place wired for the TV? Nope, need chairs, and our chairs have certain requirements, like a lift chair for Steve. The desk won't hold much, but it's adorable. It's not our vision, our needs. But we won't be living there again.
Now, I wonder if I could persuade her to put a pan of cookies in the oven, or bake a loaf of bread. I hear that screams "Home!" to a lot of folks. You know, the ones who need help seeing themselves in a different place and how that fits them.
Do you suppose...? Could it be an olfactory thing?
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