This old house

When Darling Daughter and Prince Charming made a whistle-stop through town earlier this week, they opened a door to me I hadn't been through in more than 40 years--the one that opens the house where I grew up.

They had been in the house a few months ago when an invitation to a "house party" landed them at the address they recognized as my old house. DD came in the next morning telling me I had been right about the length of the hall, although she had never really believed me when I had described it to her years before. She had a snapshot of part of the kitchen that floored me; I couldn't believe that it could be right. Turned out that it was.

When they took me back this week, they parked on the old gravel driveway--somewhat overgrown, but otherwise not much changed--and we walked around to the front door. The old sidewalk was just as I remembered it; I was amazed at how familiar the mosaic pattern looked after all these years. I had forgotten that Daddy had built in a gentle S-curve when he moved the walk from another part of the yard, but that made sense as I looked at it with the knowledge that the move also explained the broken concrete; the distance from the house to the other yard was farther than the distance from the front door, and the S-curve probably made the pieces fit.

The house sits on the south half of a square block that Daddy always said was one acre, although I never really knew how accurate that was. The north half of the block was divided into two lots:  the mysterious Granny Whalen lived on the east end for years (I think she was usually about 104; that's all I really remember about her), and the Nedbaleks with their assortment of little kids lived on the west. Our house stretched across the south side, facing a Little League ball field and a small, open field that backed up to the local golf course; I didn't know until I bought a house of my own what it meant to live in a house with neighbors an arms length away and houses across the street.

I had been warned years ago to expect the house to be carpeted; my brother Beau had been in the house when my children were small and had noticed that. Otherwise, the front living area was unsurprising to me. It was furnished, and with furniture and carpeting, it was no longer the "echo chamber" that we had called it in the years before Mother had reupholstered a couch and chair from an estate sale and eventually added a coffee table and end tables. The curtains she had made of sheets were long gone, but the plastic blinds in the windows reminded me of the jalousies Mother had complained about for years, even after Daddy replaced them with more modern aluminum windows. We walked through the front living area to the back, where the "family room" and kitchen are, but this tour really needs to begin in the hall.

When I stepped into the hall, I did a double-take myself. I remember growing up wondering how people lived in houses with tiny hallways, but I had forgotten over time how very long ours was: by my guess,  more than 40 feet from the coat closet where the hall deadends into the living room on the east end to the Fibber McGee on the west). I almost immediately flashed back to the year Ron Poof had gotten an Odd Ogg for Christmas and we scruffed along on the floor chasing the Odd Ogg and its bright-colored balls. The house might look different, but the memories really don't.

The old telephone window was also gone. I'm not sure what architectural gimmick that was supposed to have been, but it was about a foot-square opening in the wall between the kitchen and the hallway with a little shelf where our telephone used to sit. I remember picking up the phone to call a friend and hearing voices on our party line, and I remember sitting on the hallway floor for hours and talking to my friends while I was a teenager—a memory that will never happen for kids in a cellphone age.

The first room I remember sleeping in was the first room on the left down the hall. It was empty this week because the renter who has been there has moved out and another was coming in. I was a little surprised to see that it's probably about as big as my master bedroom now, but not so surprised to see that the door-sized mirrors are gone from the closets. I don't remember mirrors on the doors of the closet farther from the door, but I well remember all three of us girls preening before the mirrored doors in dresses Mother had made us to wear to parties and proms. For some reason, I remembered the pink dress with the rabbits in purple vests: I had pitched a fit when Mother first showed me the fabric for that dress and its matching purple apron, but the first time I wore it, it became my favorite dress. I wonder if Mother ever realized that?

I don't remember a small closet between the first two bedrooms, but since it wasn't my house anymore, I didn't open the door. It might have always been there; I just don't remember. (Sister Susan Rene says it might have been there, and since it's right across the hall from the kitchen door, maybe it once provided pantry space for the kitchen.)

The next room down had been Mother and Daddy's room in my earliest recollection, but after they added onto the house when I was about 8, it became SR's room; when she moved on, it became mine. Daddy had asked me what color I wanted to paint it, I had asked for "ice blue"  (I had in mind the almost colorless blue of a Texas sky on a hot summer day); the color I got was somewhat darker, making the room almost depressing, but it was the only room in the house that wasn't either white or "sand," so I was thrilled to have a color. I suppose the room had had a phone in it from the time the phones had been installed in the house (not for several years after I was born, but that's another story), and DD noticed that the paint between the two windows was still uneven where the mounting holes had been.

I had to force myself not to open the closet (the young men who live there had given me free rein to look around, but I figured opening closets was a little too invasive), but I could imagine the placement of the rods and the dresser I had pushed up against the back wall, and I remember hours in there reading or daydreaming or pouting—certainly no surprise that my Soldier Son found himself as happy in his closet as anywhere else in the house. The room had never seen to me to be much more than a closet itself, but it was my closet, and I loved it. (SR wonders if it would seem smaller to her now, and it might: she moved to it from sharing a room with Margaret Joan and me, and the openness of her very own room probably felt liberating!)

I jolted a bit when I stepped across the hall into the bathroom that had been "mine" for as long as I lived in the house. DD asked me if we had had that "funny" bathtub, and I saw immediately that the old tub had been moved out for a tile area that appeared to have been designed to accommodate a wheelchair. That also might explain why the owner at the time had torn out the vanity cabinet and, more disappointing, the medicine cabinet over it that I assume Daddy had built. As I recall it, the cabinet stretched the full 4 or 5 ft of the wall over the vanity. It was set into the wall rather than being attached to it, and it had sliding mirror doors that were maybe 30 in. tall. I've never seen a medicine cabinet like it since then, never one I've liked as much.

But accommodations for a wheelchair meant the owner had to have more space, so the cabinets were gone, replaced by a pedestal basin, and the toilet had been turned to the other wall; a handicap rail ran along the wall that would have been behind the old toilet and cabinet. Later, as we were coming back down the hall, I opened the storage cabinet to show DD how sturdily the cabinets had been built, and we laughed when we saw that the inside of the cabinet still appears to be the old pink that it had been painted to match the pink tiles on the vanity top and around the tub—more than 50 years ago.

The room next to the bathroom had been our brothers' room until the other two bedrooms were added, and then it became Ron Poof's. When Beau moved out, RP moved to the newer room, and the older one became Mother's sewing room. It also felt completely familiar, and I realized how big the windows seemed. The house I live in now has a couple of windows that sit about as low in the dining area, but none that low in the bedrooms. I supposed houses built, like mine,  in the 70s may have used smaller windows as a way of saving energy, but I remember loving being able to look out those big windows.

The tiny bathroom on the other side of the third bedroom had been added along with the two new bedrooms. It didn't appear to have been changed except that someone had mounted a small shelf above the toilet. Oddly, of all the rooms in the house, it was a bathroom that first felt the most like "home"!

The room that had been first Beau's and then RP's didn't look different to me (except for the addition of a ceiling fan and carpet), except that I mostly remember it when Beau lived there, and then you could never see the floor; he was a first-class pigpen, and his room showed it. The kid who lives there now isn't exactly a neat-freak, but except for the laundry piling up in the closet, the room was much cleaner than my memory allows. 

The old closet Mother referred to as her Fibber McGee had he same problem: the boys who live in the house have established a set of bowling pins on the floor of the closet, but the rest of it was sparsely filled. Otherwise, it's about the same, too.

And the room that became Mother and Daddy's is almost "normal," too. The built-in dressers that flanked Mother's dressing table are still there, but the table itself is gone. I was amused that the furniture in that room was nicer than any Mother and Daddy ever owned, and that there was a tricycle in the corner near the closet. I'd have loved to know why the tricycle was there, but I didn't dare ask. It's the only thing in the house that reminisces of kids.

Back on the east end of the house, behind the living room, I nosed into the utility room. DD was surprised when I opened the door  because of the size of the space. The last guy to move out took the dryer with him, so the room has only a washer and a water heater in it now and looks really empty; I was a little disoriented by the fact that Mother's ironing basket was missing from the corner and the ironing board was not open along the nearby wall. I suppose I can forgive myself my basket of clothes that often don't make it into the dresser since I mostly recall the ironing basket as full enough to imagine the wrinkled clothes just toppling off the top.

The kitchen and family room were the most jolting. The commercial-weight sliding glass doors that Daddy installed are still there, although they no longer have the "one-way" glass that was so much fun for us. I opened one just to test the weight, and I loved the feeling of the big, heavy doors that still glide amazingly smoothly on their heavy-duty tracks. One of them is covered by a tightly stretched sheet the guys use for tv projection; through the other, I looked out across the patio where Mother used to drink her morning coffee and read the newspaper and where she and Daddy sat outside for hours at night and just enjoyed the stars. I'm not sure why they weren't carried away by mosquitoes.

Beyond the patio, all of the Chinese tallow trees they planted are gone (one tallow stands outside the fence at the end of the house, but I don't think it's one they planted), but most of the yard is filled by a big, bean-shaped swimming pool, and beyond that is a privacy fence--which means I couldn't look out toward Granny Whalen's, the Nedbaleks', or Bocca Sue's old house.

I had mixed feelings about the family room, and I was totally deflated by the kitchen. I had always thought of the kitchen as big, although standing in it this week made me think differently; it's not as big as the kitchen I have in my little house, but I loved it when I was growing up because of its design. (Remember making cookies the day we stayed home from school because of Hurricane Carla? or in high school, when our resident Aggie requested peanut butter cookies so he could be the masher?) Back then, we entered the kitchen from the hallway, between the refrigerator (where Daddy always had a cold pitcher, which on good days was full of water) and the "sink end" along the west wall of the kitchen.

The kitchen had been on the back side of the house (I cried when they cut down the old Chinese tallow tree to add on the family room), so the cabinetry followed the old wall line, making an L from the sink area on the west end across the north side to a slot that eventually held a dishwasher, a range, and a double oven. Since the cabinet in the corner between the sink and the dishwasher would have been mostly inaccessible, it had been closed off on the kitchen side and opened into the family room. That way, we could always easily get completely into the cabinet and we had a fine spot near the dining area to store board games. I always thought that was clever.

With the sink and the range sharing an L shape, the refrigerator across the room completed a handy "work triangle," and the rest of the wall east of to the fridge was storage and workspace. On the bottom it had a couple of banks of drawers with a cabinet between, where we stored appliances like the mixer and the blender, and above that was built-in china storage, again with big sliding glass doors. Across the east end of the kitchen  was a pantry that ran the full width of the room (8 ft?) and had sliding wooden doors. I remember those doors as being big and heavy, but I would never have dreamed that the pantry would be broken into two smaller units, one with a swinging door and one with a folding one. The shelving seemed to be about the same, but the two doors were, at best, aesthetically disappointing.

The rest of the kitchen was more than aesthetically disappointing. All of the cabinetry has been ripped out and replaced with junky looking stuff from a second-rate supplier. The sink is still where it was, and the cabinetry next to the hallway is pretty much the same, but a similar cabinet sits to the right of the sink and the "game cabinet" is gone. The dishwasher has also been removed and the space where it was is open, leaving a pass-through into the family room. Where the range used to be is a bar sink, which seems silly since it's less than 4 ft from the kitchen sink and it consumes any workspace that might have been there. The double oven is gone, so the passage into the family room is wider, but needlessly so. A smallish refrigerator sits where the china cabinet used to be, and more of the cheap cabinetry flanks the oven on that wall, with more cheap wooden-doored cabinets above. 

The theme of cheap wood cabinetry extends into the family room in the form of cheap paneling that may have made someone think they were moving up at some time, but now it just looks sad. (It makes me think I need to take better care of the window-pane paneling I have in my house, and it makes me appreciate my paneling's much better quality.) The friend who let us into the house had noticed that the paneling is covering up the old windows where the water-cooled fan hung before the place was air conditioned; as hot as the house was when I was in it, I wondered if adding another water fan would have helped with the utility bill!

The odd thing was the fireplace that has been added at the north end of that room. Since it's not the "family room" for these guys, they have a bar-height table pushed against the bar sink in the kitchen and a couch at about the same place where ours used to be, but the rest of the room is pretty empty. The fireplace at the end of the room is where our television was, and it's about the nicest thing in the house. Except for the absurdity of having a fireplace in Texas (which I figured out about a year after I moved into a house with one), it's really quite beautifully built. Instead of the short, narrow hearth mine has, this one stretches completely across the width of the room and curves gracefully out in front of the fire, almost into a little "stage" area; in fact, I could easily imagine myself as a little girl playing pretend as an actor or singer on the family stage.

It was an odd visit; the place isn't "the same" (not that I could possibly expect it to be), but the changes except for the kitchen and bathroom are mostly amazingly small. It's not "home" any more, but I'm glad I got to go see; the memories are still intact.