I've been in my old house--in my head--for the last couple days. I can see it clearly. I can smell it, and I can hear it. It hasn't been far from me for weeks, but lately a few things have picked me up and set me down squarely in the middle of it. I spent the last two days watching house remodeling marathons, wondering how weird it would be if I tried to recreate my childhood home in my next, and hopefully final, house. I think it would be fairly simple to achieve the tone of the house, without going overboard on details. I could paint rooms a similar color (pale blue-gray), and maybe go to a salvage store for some vintage hardware, like crystal doorknobs and long, rectangular strike plates to go on solid wood doors. Bringing back the particular resonance of walking on the wood floor, or tuning the back door to squeak and rattle exactly like my old one did, now that would be a hell of a trick.
I'm not the only one who can't let go of the old homestead. Last week, my younger daughter expressed a similar desire to recreate the house, but on a much grander scale. She would rebuild it from scratch, remaking the entire place. I suggested that if she do so, she should correct a few of the mistakes my grandparents made when they built it. As my mother has said often, there was not a single piece of the place where they didn't use the cheapest, least environmentally-friendly materials. It was as well-insulated as an old barn, and I'm pretty sure there were places in upstairs closets where you could see daylight through the eaves. It was heated by gas furnaces, some large units in the downstairs floors, wall units in each bathroom, and a little free-standing iron gas heater in front of a large sheet of asbestos paneling in the upstairs "play room." That's right, I said a sheet of asbestos, in a play room.
I was re-reading my story from the November NaNoWriMo challenge tonight, what there is of it. It is decidedly fiction, but I set it firmly in the real house I grew up in, from the time when I was a very little girl. I put so many details in the story of how it looked, of the dark yellow daisy print bedspreads in the room where I slept, of the sound of the swing on the screen porch, of the smell of mothballs in the toy closet in the den. I forgot when I talked to my daughter that so far, only I had seen all these things written down. As we discussed the house, I kept expecting her already to know all the things I had described. She only knew the house as it existed in the last couple decades, after a lot of those things were removed. If she does rebuild it one day, I call dibs on helping her decorate it, so she can experience it the way I did. But I promise, no asbestos.
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