Today I am cleaning the tiny fireplace room. It is my favorite place in the house. (When you live in a house long enough, the rooms evolve into what they want to be. I can’t tell you how many of my rooms have fought me from becoming what I first intended and once they settled themselves, didn't want to be anything else.)
My friend, Linda, told me that the decorating choices you make usually have a reason…and I am leaning how to track down the memory that is stirred and enjoy it double, then and now.
The fireplace room is a tiny piece of my grandparent’s house in McBain, Michigan. A 1920’s to 40’s feel. It has a generous arts and crafts rocking chair similar to the chair that my grandmother rocked three times to push her over-plump body to her swollen feet. It has tall dark plant stand like the one by the seldom used front entry door. I remember wormy squiggly catus plants and other succulents with leathery leaves and snake plants and African violets in the entry way. (Up in the attic was a dried money plant and a vase of scary looking peacock feathers whose eyes terrified me as a little girl...I think I’ll go buy some…)
There was an old waterfall floor radio that made static or high pitched whiney noises when we tried to push the buttons or turn the knobs. I have a small 1920 retro radio that makes the same wonderful click when you turn it on.
My grandparents had a scratchy platform rocker in pinkish beige. I too have an old platform rocker in unfortunate green and gold stripes of a slightly more modern pattern but the right colors for my room. There was a small old book case with a glass door behind the rocking chair with wonderful saintly old books that my sisters would read on every visit. My fireplace room has a small bookcase with nothing published too recently.
I don’t have the cabbage roses on my carpet…and they didn’t have a fireplace. But they had a TV with rabbit ears. And I have my computer. The fireplace comes from other happy memories…
I don’t think I knew my grandparents as people very well, but I experienced a gentle contentment in their house that was a buffer from my real world that was heading toward the 1960’s and my personal world in which I would soon be a teenager. In my fireplace room, I created for myself a little of the magic that lived at my grandma’s house, a place caught between the marvels of electricity and homemade bread with jam every morning.
What is your favorite room?
Love,
Mary
3 comments:
I could never make a room as pristine as Grandma Mejeur's living room was. The big brass curtain holders stick out in my mind. I think if I replicated a place of comfort from their house it would be the porch.
I laughed out loud at the part about "scary eyes" on the peacock feathers!
I don't know about a favorite room, but my favorite spot in a room was on our couch (which was not the same as a sofa or "davenport" as we called ours in those days). The couch was more like a soft bed with lots of pillows on it, and it was over in a corner of our less formal living room. I lay on it and read books all the time. In those days I wore dresses a lot, and I lay there with my knees drawn up and crossed one leg over the other knee. That caused my older sister to comment in one of two impatient ways: "I can see your underpants" or "Mom, make her do something." Little did she realize I was getting ready for my career.
Lana
I know a room that I would have loved if we were allowed in there. It was a "parlor" with french doors and windows on two sides and the best furniture to look good for annual elder visits and Bible Study every six months. Crazy how we "save" things and end up wasting them.
Rosa
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