Assignment: Describe a scene - from your own "place."
My husband pulls back his recliner and exposes a large hole in the carpet . "Time to do some major redecorating around here," he says.
"Just put your recliner back over the hole, dear," I say. "Each grandchild in turn has run toy cars and trucks over this family room carpet. We can't take it up and deprive them of the 'roadways' its plaid design affords them. When we are gone and they are grown, it will be another of the fond memories they will have of our home."
"A memory of holes in the rug," he says, and pulls his recliner forward again.
Our house is us -- all of us --, and for better or for worse, I love it and its contents. The "purple chair" in our living room, for example. It's not purple anymore, actually, having been re-upholstered in a mellon-shade fabric some sixteen years ago. Back in the old house, though, it had been purple. We lived in the old house twenty-five years before moving to this one. For all of those twenty-five years, we referred to it as "the new house." Now it is "the old house," of course, but the chair for some unknown reason is still "the purple chair."
It is the most comfortable seat in our living room. My husband sits here to read. If he sits in his recliner in the family room to read, he falls asleep; the same as I do if I sit in my recliner in the family room. Lately, all he or I have to do to fall asleep is to get fairly horizontal.
"Clear conscience," my husband explains it.
"Or low mentality," I say.
Neither of us even entertains the thought that it might have to do with age.
Anyway, when my husband and I have reading to do, we vie for the "purple" chair. He usually wins, leaving me to 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. One time when Linda, our oldest child, was visiting with her husband, she saw her sister Ann's son, who was then under two-years-old and at that time our only grandchild, remove all eight pillows from the couch, including the firm, round, wonderful bolster pillows, and throw them on the floor. In horror she watched as he used the two large seat pillows as trampolines, bouncing from one to the other, and back again.
"Ann!" she said to 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."
Centered above the couch 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.
On another wall, behind the "purple" chair, is our Russian icon. Gold-colored metal half-covers the Byzantine-looking oil painting of Jesus' face. A minor official in the Russian government gave the icon to my father-in-law a long time ago. My father-in-law had to smuggle it out of Russia, or so he said. He had many fascinating tales, and his family took them with a grain of salt, but I believed them all and do so still. He had had an entire other life before coming to America and marrying my pretty little red-headed Bostonian mother-in-law.
After his death, my mother-in-law gave the icon to us, along with two statues that now stand on either side of our grandfather clock in the hall. The three-feet-tall statues
are hollow and of dull, coppery metal. One statue is a woodsman holding an ax over his right shoulder. The other is an apronned woman in long peasant dress, holding a bundle of twigs and kindling in her arms.
I had often admired them in my in-laws' home. "You like the statues, don't you, Sugah?" my mother-in-law had said to me in her Boston way. "You can have them some day. They were in our house in Nashville."
Their fabled house in Nashville! My father-in-law had bought it fully furnished and had moved his young family there from Boston. I never before in my life, nor since, have heard of anyone's buying a house completely furnished -- from basement to rooftop, including beds and sheets and elegant dining room suite, and, of course, two metal statues, which my mother-in-law called "danz lays boys."
"Danz lays boys?" I remember asking.
"It's written right there on each statue, Sugah. Go over and read the little coppah plaques at the bases for yourself."
Sure enough, the plaques read: "Dans les bois."
My father-in-law spoke seven languages, four of them fluently. My mother-in-law spoke every language as long as it was English. If the French couldn't pronounce their words as we do in English, she considered that their problem, not hers.
When we were still in the other house, Ann, our youngest, and the only one left 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!"
She had a love affair with her room. When she came 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 talk from waking moment to bedtime hour. All of us, that is, except my husband. He economizes on words. Sometimes it's fun to guess what he means; sometimes it's a pain.
When the children were growing up in the other house, Linda, our oldest, often said she was going up to "read" Ann's room. We all knew what she meant. 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 mementos 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, being unmarried yet, 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. "Tell me again why we are moving."
"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 mementos, took them to this, our new house, and plastered them on the walls of her new room. 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 and sixth grandchild. And the mementos 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 adult life, alas, overtook her, as it does with us all.
When I have need to "read" a room these days, I simply walk into my husband's den. Ann, no doubt, inherited her mementos-plastered-on-the-wall tendencies from her father.
The walls of my little office, on the other hand, are adorned with pictures of the grandchildren, and my desk is laden with so many small frames of the their likenesses, that there is barely room for the phone.
Above my other desk, the computer desk, is a collage of our own children's school pictures, from first grade through eleventh, forty-four two-by-three-inch pictures in one large frame. Their larger, senior-year pictures are on shelves on either side of the fireplace in the family room. In so many ways, their growing-up years were my finest hour, and I like to surround myself with the memory.
The entire wall opposite the fireplace in the family room is covered with family pictures. Its maintenance is my husband's self-appointed duty, and he takes one picture down to make room for another newly-acquired one, and rearranges others to reestablish esthetic balance. In such a way, the wall is a living, ever-changing panorama, and quite a conversation piece.
My husband's portrait reigns above my piano in what we call "the music room." It used to be just that before the grandchildren were born, because besides the piano, it also houses the antique melodeon which the lovely Miss Hagmire, a maiden-lady patient of my husband's, gave him when old-age forced her to give up the family home in Aspinwall and move into a nursing home. She was her family's last survivor, and the melodeon, she told him, had been in her parents' home even before she was born. When my husband "operated" on the bellows that were losing air, he found that they had previously been patched with a newspaper dated several days before Lincoln's assassination. Needless-to-say, he repaired the bellows without disturbing the original patching. Now the room should more accurately be called the toy room, because it holds more children's books and games and toys than anything else. The grandchildren make a beeline for the room when they come to visit.
And what of the fore-named grandfather clock that stands tall between the woodsman and his lady? My husband made it from a kit. The clockworks came 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 sleeping.
My husband also made a "hi-fi" from a kit, and we used it for years before replacing it with the present stereo. He made the hi-fi when we lived in our first house. Oh, yes, our first house! If our other house is now "the old house," then our first house is the "old-old house" -- so old in fact, that it is but a loved and distant memory of a tiny one-story place that we moved into with one little toddler, and out of six years later with three lively toddlers and a new baby. Yet, it had seemed a palace in comparison to its predecessor, the first home my husband and I shared so happily together, -- a drafty, third-floor apartment in a very old, no-elevator building.
The stereo that replaced the hi-fi doesn't work anymore, but we have a CD player on top of it that does work. In this way, we are able to keep the old and yet enjoy the benefits of the new.
"In simili modo," as the old Latin Mass used to say, I wish that, for the grandchildren's sake, we could somehow figure a way to re-carpet the family room and yet retain the intricate road system the "hole-y" carpet provides. Then would I cheerfully consider some serious redecorating of this, our family museum.