Barbourville
Nov. 28th, 2005 01:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
luciabI was already feeling fairly nostalgic, as you might expect, and then I read this lovely entry from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
madlori.
The house where Aunt Susan was living is where my grandparents lived, and I thought it was the grandest house EVAR. It is a brick two-story in a small town (3,500 or so) in southern KY, and is at a T-intersection with a blinking yellow light. The room where I slept when we visited faced the street and I could see the reflected glow of the light, blinking yellow, when I went to bed at night. Since we lived in the country, I thought anything to do with a town was totally fabulous, including blinking lights. (Yeah, yeah, I know there are blinking lights on country roads, too, but not anywhere near where I lived; there was certainly not enough traffic to warrant such a luxury.) But then, we established a long time ago that I was (am?) quite the little country mouse.
The house was, at a guess, built in the late teens or twenties. It had a front porch the width of the house, and between the porch and the driveway were bushes big enough to play under. This was also the source of moss that I used when I made little models of Indian villages for history class, with mirror lakes and construction-paper teepees.
When we walked in the front door for a weekend visit, we were always greeted by the aroma of warm cookies and often cake(s) made by Mom Arthur.
The house had a central hall that was big enough for a sofa, chair, and the phone table; there was also a floor furnace there. That was the heart of the house and definitely the place to be. There was a door to the stairs, which had an interior window that looked into the hallway. The stairs were pretty wonderful, too-- wide, with a landing where the stairs changed direction instead of just going straight up, and there were cut-out silhouettes of long-ago family members hanging on the walls.
The two large bedrooms on the second floor had huge walk-in closets that I envy to this day. Both closets were crammed with my grandparents’ old clothes and hats in hat boxes, no less. We weren’t allowed to play dress-up in the clothes, but we loved to hide in the closets. There was a third bedroom upstairs, but it was tiny and had a sloped ceiling that came to within about three feet of the floor on one side, and there was an access door to a bit of attic in that wall. My brother (and I found out, last week, my cousin Sharon, too) was afraid of that room because of the attic access door. For some reason I was never afraid in that room, but I still liked the front room better because it had big windows that looked out over the street with the streetlight. It also had small windows way up high above the floor, on the sides of the room where it poked out above the front porch.
There was a bookcase in the hall on the second floor; the only books I recall were mysteries by Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers. I found a couple of them last weekend; no idea if they are the same ones that were there umpty-ump years ago.
Alongside my memories of the real place is the memory of a dream about the house. There were several dreams, actually, but the key feature stayed the same in all of them. In the dream, there was a second set of stairs that led from the back of the main hall, just outside the kitchen, to another bedroom. This bedroom wasn’t furnished except for a ladderback chair and a four-poster bed which stood on a low platform. The bed was made up but the room was almost Shaker in its simplicity. I dreamed about this phantom room so often that when I think about the house I recall this room almost as though it were real.
Apparently the pack-rat gene runs rampant in our family. While the dream-room may have been bare, certainly none of the real rooms were. After Aunt Susan first fell in September, several ladies from her church came to help clear out the house to make it safer for her. They said they threw out bags and bags full of junk, and there are still boxes piled high in all the upstairs rooms, packed with letters, photos, books, knick-knacks and other random assorted stuff. It’s good to know I come by this trait honestly.
The old memories are now tainted with memories of the house as it was after Aunt Susan’s funeral, already empty and irrelevant. The stuff that had been shuffled upstairs smelled musty and mildewed. Downstairs, the furniture showed evidence of abuse by various pets, and Aunt Susan had given away several of the portraits from the walls. They didn’t always go to the person specified in her will, either, which is unfortunate, at best.)
I am awaiting word from Mother about when/if they want me to come up and help them sort everything and get the house ready to sell. My free time is drawing to an end.
madlori. The house where Aunt Susan was living is where my grandparents lived, and I thought it was the grandest house EVAR. It is a brick two-story in a small town (3,500 or so) in southern KY, and is at a T-intersection with a blinking yellow light. The room where I slept when we visited faced the street and I could see the reflected glow of the light, blinking yellow, when I went to bed at night. Since we lived in the country, I thought anything to do with a town was totally fabulous, including blinking lights. (Yeah, yeah, I know there are blinking lights on country roads, too, but not anywhere near where I lived; there was certainly not enough traffic to warrant such a luxury.) But then, we established a long time ago that I was (am?) quite the little country mouse.
The house was, at a guess, built in the late teens or twenties. It had a front porch the width of the house, and between the porch and the driveway were bushes big enough to play under. This was also the source of moss that I used when I made little models of Indian villages for history class, with mirror lakes and construction-paper teepees.
When we walked in the front door for a weekend visit, we were always greeted by the aroma of warm cookies and often cake(s) made by Mom Arthur.
The house had a central hall that was big enough for a sofa, chair, and the phone table; there was also a floor furnace there. That was the heart of the house and definitely the place to be. There was a door to the stairs, which had an interior window that looked into the hallway. The stairs were pretty wonderful, too-- wide, with a landing where the stairs changed direction instead of just going straight up, and there were cut-out silhouettes of long-ago family members hanging on the walls.
The two large bedrooms on the second floor had huge walk-in closets that I envy to this day. Both closets were crammed with my grandparents’ old clothes and hats in hat boxes, no less. We weren’t allowed to play dress-up in the clothes, but we loved to hide in the closets. There was a third bedroom upstairs, but it was tiny and had a sloped ceiling that came to within about three feet of the floor on one side, and there was an access door to a bit of attic in that wall. My brother (and I found out, last week, my cousin Sharon, too) was afraid of that room because of the attic access door. For some reason I was never afraid in that room, but I still liked the front room better because it had big windows that looked out over the street with the streetlight. It also had small windows way up high above the floor, on the sides of the room where it poked out above the front porch.
There was a bookcase in the hall on the second floor; the only books I recall were mysteries by Ngaio Marsh, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy Sayers. I found a couple of them last weekend; no idea if they are the same ones that were there umpty-ump years ago.
Alongside my memories of the real place is the memory of a dream about the house. There were several dreams, actually, but the key feature stayed the same in all of them. In the dream, there was a second set of stairs that led from the back of the main hall, just outside the kitchen, to another bedroom. This bedroom wasn’t furnished except for a ladderback chair and a four-poster bed which stood on a low platform. The bed was made up but the room was almost Shaker in its simplicity. I dreamed about this phantom room so often that when I think about the house I recall this room almost as though it were real.
Apparently the pack-rat gene runs rampant in our family. While the dream-room may have been bare, certainly none of the real rooms were. After Aunt Susan first fell in September, several ladies from her church came to help clear out the house to make it safer for her. They said they threw out bags and bags full of junk, and there are still boxes piled high in all the upstairs rooms, packed with letters, photos, books, knick-knacks and other random assorted stuff. It’s good to know I come by this trait honestly.
The old memories are now tainted with memories of the house as it was after Aunt Susan’s funeral, already empty and irrelevant. The stuff that had been shuffled upstairs smelled musty and mildewed. Downstairs, the furniture showed evidence of abuse by various pets, and Aunt Susan had given away several of the portraits from the walls. They didn’t always go to the person specified in her will, either, which is unfortunate, at best.)
I am awaiting word from Mother about when/if they want me to come up and help them sort everything and get the house ready to sell. My free time is drawing to an end.
