So, it’s been three weeks since we finished painting the family room. By now, as you can imagine, the newness has rather worn off. Sure, I still like the new color — anything had to be better than that acid green! — but it’s beginning to look a bit creepy with the smoke detector being the only adornment on the walls.

The thing is, I’ve never been comfortable picking out art for my home. What I mean is that I love having art, I love looking at art that I’ve chosen because it pleases my eye, but I despise having people come into my home and look at the art I’ve chosen because it usually reveals a side of me that I have not shared with them. (For that very reason, I probably could have written that sentence as “I despise having people come into my home” regardless of what art they see.)

But blank walls do get dull after a while and, well, people seem to read into them, too.

Studio RTA Furniture has some rather nice framed art which I’ve been looking at for the past hour or so. The prices seem rather reasonable, but I still haven’t figured out why a person would buy a Picasso reproduction. Do they think no one will know it’s not the original?

This might be why I tend to hang things on my walls rather than actual artwork: a longboard that washed up on the shore of our old beach house in Hawaii, a quartet of brass candle sconces I picked up at a flea market in Europe, the tribal masks collected during various trips my husband and I have taken before and since we’ve been married. I like seeing these things and remembering how they came into my life and how my life has changed since. My neighbors in suburbia, however, love to talk about the strange lady who has a Tongan war mask hanging in her dining room. (Then again, I bet none of them could point out Tonga on a map.)

My husband’s solution to the blank wall situation has him lobbying to move the horsehair dart-board from his office to the family room. That is so not going to happen, and I’ll tell you why: not only do I recall the two years it took to get him to paint the room in the first place — a paint job which would be destroyed the first time someone sank a dart into my wall — but my family room also serves as the one place that I get to relax. And that, as we all know, means having a martini. Or two. Martinis and darts do not mix.

You’d think he’d have learned that by now.