"Nonsense!" she says. "This is a wonderful home! It looks like you and your family. It IS you and your family."
She's right; it IS us.
We call the chair she sits in our purple chair. It isn't purple; it's orange, but back in the old house, it had been purple. We had lived in the old house for twenty-five years before moving to this one. For all of those twenty-five years, we referred to it as "the new house." Now, of course, it is "the old house."
But to return to the chair...why did we have it reupholstered in orange when we moved into this present new house twelve years ago? I don't remember why. I do remember why it had been purple, though. We needed an accent color, or so I thought at the time. I had just been reading The Better Homes and Gardens Home Design Book. Somewhere on one of the shelves in the den, I still have that book. It's an antique of the fifties, just like me, and probably of some value now, the book, that is...not me.
I love that chair. It is the most comfortable seat in our living room. My husband sits here to read. If he sits in his lounge chair in the family room to read, he falls asleep; the same as I do if I sit in MY lounge chair in the family room. Lately, we fall asleep so readily. All we have to do is get fairly horizontal. A slouchy sitting position will do. We think it's either a clear conscience or low mentality. It certainly can't be old age! This was to be the home of our old age, but we refuse to be old...yet, anyway.
When we were still in the other house, Ann, our youngest, and the only one still in the nest at the time, said, "Oh, please, please, please! Don't sell this wonderful house until I have graduated. I would HATE to come home to my bedroom and find it in another house!"
When she would come home from long months at college, she would run right up the stairs to her bedroom in the old house (which even at that late date was still the "new house".) "Hi, room," she would say. "Did you miss me? I missed you!" We are a family that talks, talks, talks....to people, to rooms, to anything and anyone who will listen...and even if they will not. We all are, that is, except my husband. He economizes on words. Sometimes it's fun to guess what he means by his one-word answers to my questions. Sometimes it is less-than-fun.
Linda, our oldest child, used to say she loved to go in and "read" Ann's room. Almost every inch of wall space, to say nothing of the large cork bulletin board, was covered with posters and tickets and all kinds of momentos of Ann's girlhood.
We sold the old house a month after Ann's college graduation, and the three of us moved together into this new house. Ann had already set her wedding date for a year hence, and stayed with us in the interim, rather than rent an apartment of her own for so short a time.
The week-end before we moved, our son Tom came down from Sandusky to, as he said, "shoot a few baskets through the old hoop in the old driveway, one last time." I heard the bounce of the basketball for a long while that evening, and when he came in, Tom's eyes were wet. I felt guilty.
"We're robbing our kids of their beloved childhood home!" I said to my husband that night in bed.
"Just Tom and Ann," he said. "Linda and Steve don't seem to mind."
"Tell me again why we are moving," I said.
"No steps," he said.
I could only guess what he meant. "Well," I said before dropping off to sleep, "since you put it that way....."
So, Ann packed up her momentos, took them to our new house and plastered them on the walls of her room here. Now since her marriage, that room is our guest room, as well as repository for the crib which has been there for each of our grandchildren when "staying over." The Looney Tunes mobile over the crib is new, recently bought for our son Steve's little daughter, our brand-new sixth, and no doubt, last grandchild. And the momentos that had briefly adorned the walls? Well, Ann packed them up again when she and her then-new husband moved to their apartment, but I never saw them in evidence there, or indeed, in her present house. Once married, I think her adult life, alas, overtook her, as it does with us all.
During the brief year Ann lived with us in the new house, I said to her, "If you weren't going to be leaving to get married, Honey, I would buy a third lounge chair to put in the family room for you."
"Oh, right, Mum! Thank God I'm getting married! Can't you just see the three of us asleep in our lounge chairs each evening?"
Anyway, if my husband and I have reading to do, we vie for the purple (now orange) chair, and he usually wins. Then I settle for the long couch on the opposite wall, the green-beige-tan-and-brown-striped one with a bolster pillow on each end, four large cushions along the back, and two larger cushions on the seat. Centered over it on the wall is an enormous oil painting of Hrachney Castle in Prague and the lovely Charles Bridge over the Charles River. The painting had been my father-in-law's. He grew up in Prague.
Our daughter Linda and her husband were visiting us from Washington one day. Linda saw Ann's little son (our first, and at that time, our only grandchild) remove from that long green-beige-tan-and-brown-striped couch, all eight pillows, including the firm, round, wonderful bolster pillows, and throw them on the floor. She watched as he then used the two large seat pillows as trampolines, bouncing from one to the other, and back again.
"Ann!" I heard her tell her sister, "Look what he's doing! Mum will have a fit!"
"Oh, she lets him do that," Ann said.
"She does? That's the same couch she wouldn't even let us SIT on when we were little!"
"The couch is older now, Linda," I said, "and so am I."
"If there is such a thing as reincarnation," Linda said, "I'm putting in for coming back as your grandchild!"
"Not my child?"
"Hell no!"
My friend gets up from the purple (now orange) chair and studies the Russian icon on the wall behind the chair. She fingers the gold-colored metal that half-covers the oil painting of Jesus' face.
"Some big muckety-muck in the Russian government gave that to my father-in-law a long time ago," I tell her. "He had to smuggle it out, because icons are considered national treasures in Russia, and must not be taken out of the country. The government official liked him. Just about everybody did. What a charmer! But the official told him that if it was discovered, he would deny ever having known my father-in-law. Of course, with his proverbial luck, he was never found out. My mother-in-law gave the icon to us after his death."
I point to the statues on either side of the grandfather clock. From where my friend and I are standing beside the purple (now orange) chair, we can see them in the hallway. They are of dull, coppery metal, hollow, and about three-feet-tall. One statue is a woodsman holding an axe over his right shoulder. The other is an aproned woman in long peasant dress, with a bundle of twigs and kindling in her arms.
"They came from my in-laws' house, too," I tell her. "And the clock? Oh, my husband made it from a kit. The clockworks come from Germany. It chimes the Westminster Chimes. We turn the chimes off when the children are visiting, because it bongs throughout the house and keeps them awake. The funny thing is, when the chimes are turned off, I have trouble getting to sleep!"
My friend walks over to see the statues, and with love and longing, I remember my mother-in-law and her unique way of speaking.
"You like those statues, don't you, Sugah?" my plump, pretty little Irish mother-in-law from Boston had said to me. "They were in our house in Nashville."
That fabled house in Nashville! My father-in-law had bought it fully furnished and had moved his young family there from Boston. I had never before in my life heard of anyone's buying a house completely furnished from basement to roof top, from beds and sheets to elegant dining room suite, to metal statues.
"They're called 'danz lays boys'," my mother-in-law told me.
"Danz lays boys?" I asked.
"It's written right there on each statue, Sugah. Go over and read the little copper plaques at the bases for yourself "Danz lays boys'."
Sure enough, upon reading the plaques, I see that they are, indeed, called "Dans les bois."
"That drop-leaf table here in the living room is also from their house," I tell my friend. "But that stereo over there...that came from our very first house."
Our first house...oh, yes, our first house. If our other house is now the old house, then our first house, when we mention it at all, which is seldom, is the old-old house....so old-old, in fact, that it is but a fond, distant memory of a tiny one-story place that we moved into with one dear little toddler, and out of six years later with three lively toddlers and a new baby.
"Interesting-looking stereo," my friend says.
"My husband made that from a kit, too," I say. She looks puzzled. "Really, " I say, "he did. When we lived in the old-old house. Only it was called a hi-fi back then, not a stereo."
"Does it still work?"
"No. That's why we have that CD player on top of it."
"Well, that's progress," she says. "And now I really must be going. Thank you for the tea."
"Thank YOU," I think, "for tour of life and family.