John S:
When I was 15 and had moved away from my family, I rented a room in the house of a family I knew from my high school. It was (and still is) a grand old home in NE Portland with three stories and five bedrooms. When I moved into my room I really didn't have much in the way of furnishings at all. I believe the bed came with the room, and that's about it. I brought my stereo (in those days, a turntable and speakers) and several old wooden crates. On the crates I put some house plants, and on the wall I hung a big Gaugin poster. There really wasn't much at all, but I made it look pretty. After the chaotic years I had just lived through, the simplicity of the room, and knowing that everything in it, however humble, was what I had chosen to put there, and that I could close the door and that no one would come in without my permission, was so good for me.
I often think of those crates and plants, my record player, that poster, that "room of my own." It was safe, peaceful, pretty, and mine.
When I was little, we got a wooden chair with a gargoyle carved into the back rest. (Is that the right word?) I was about 3 or 4 years old. This gargoyle had a leering smile and weird eyes and I was totally terrified of it. Just looking at it would make me cry. I didn't want to walk past it or go near it. My two older sisters thought that was hysterical and used to threaten me with having to sit in the chair.
Dan:
We spent allot of time with my Grandma Austran. Who wasn't our grandma but our baby sitter.
The three young ones as my parents called Mike, Mary Ellen and myself were of an age when we could be easily dropped off and taken care of by this widow in south Omaha.
She lived in the kind of house I live in now. Built around 1920, white clapboard and a sloping lawn to the street. The minute she would leave us alone I would run to the faded blue wool chair in the TV room that faced the back yard. It had thick blocky arms and stood alone near the window. I would climb up on it and stare at the arm rest on the right.
Looking for the blood stain. It had to be there. We had been told the story a number of times. Her husband had been sitting in the chair one minute and the next was slumped over dead - blood somehow being shrewn upon the armrest and floor. The chair was worn and finding the stain was difficult - I'm sure I imagined it here one week and there another. That chair was the first thing I thought of when my mother drove us up and the last thing as I walk away toward our station wagon - looking back at the smiling woman waving at me from her lonely front porch.
Kristine:all of us wanted it--the presumption is that it would go to paul (the oldest)
the story is that it was left on the back porch and when, in 1954, my parents rented the south 4th street house (4bedrooms/$75 per month) the landlady sisters said sure--they could have it and mom and dad stripped layers of paint and restored the solid oak secretary.
for me it is about the smell but let me try and give you a visual...
it is probably over 7 feet tall--and maybe 3 feet wide. the top half is original bubbled glass doors that harbored my mother's hummels and other treasured bric'brac. the lower portion had 3 or 4 ornate drawers that were heavy with boredom--insurance files and important papers a child had no need of--plus they were so hard to open. but the middle--ah....
the drop down was carved on the outside with a fan pattern--there was a lock with a key and when you opened the writing surface you were entertained by the interior. to me to my memory this is the sweetest of spots.
i was alice and the tiny door in the center had a small key--there were letters inside this cubbyhole. all around it were drawers--little small drawers with--say rubberbands or pencils or
fountain pens or staples or paperclips or "pay to the order" slips and checks and smells that i will never forget.
we moved in 1970 (the rent was still $75 but the neighborhood was going down fast)
the secretary now angled in the corner of the new living room. in 1993 we moved my parents into assisted living with the secretary. after my mother passed it followed my dad to his studio unit and then....
it seems everyone grew old and had stuff and no room or need for these pieces of our past--it seems no one wanted or could take what once seemed so precious. it ended up at my sister's because she was the one there and such an amazing caretaker.
i visit my sister regularly and when i am there i breathe in the past--i touch the rotting rubber bands and smell the pencil and lead smells and am amazed by the transport---for this alone--the price of a ticket to such wonderful memories.
Garris:
When I was a senior in high school, my beloved Grandmother (Julia Vaden Sophronia Garris Kendall) made the decision to move out of the old southern home that she had lived in for more than 60 years and into an assisted living home a couple of hours away from her town of Florence, South Carolina. My mother went down to help Grandmama close up the house and sort out all of the many pieces of furniture, paintings, incredible kitchen items and such that had become fixtures for all of us in this very large and very close knit family. As my mother was leaving to go down to Florence she asked if there was anything in the house that I would like to have and she would try and get it for me. I remember replying that there were many things I would like, but knowing that there would be many a fight over each and every item, I preferred to stay out of the battles and just keep everything in my memory. After she left however, I remembered an old radio cabinet that used to sit at the bottom of Grandmama's staircase. It no longer had the radio in it and she used it to hold knick knacks and such. I doubted that it was something anyone else would have been that interested in....but for me it was one of the most special items in the house. I used to sit and look at it as a little boy and fantasize about all of the music that had come out of that old radio cabinet. Saturday performances from the Met....sports casts....the original broadcast of Orson Welle's "War of the Worlds"....the music of Tommy Dorsey and Glen Miller and other songs of the day. To me that cabinet meant show business...and I thought it was just magical. I pondered calling Mama to see if she could maybe bring it back for me....but again....I just didn't want to fight an Aunt or a cousin over anything in the house....so I never called. When my Mom returned home after being down there for about six weeks....her truck loaded with items she had brought back from Grandmama's beautiful old house, I gave her a hug and told her about the radio cabinet and how I should have asked her to bring it home to me. She smiled such a beautiful...knowing smile and said "Go and look on the truck". There it WAS! "How did you KNOW?", I asked in amazement. "I didn't ....but Mama must have known that you loved it because when I got to her house it already had a piece of tape with you name on it". It still makes me cry.....and it still sits in my living room and is, by far, the most precious piece of furniture I own.
Valerie:
The Big Red Chair
I was tiny, all through my childhood, first growth spurt didn’t come until I was 12 or so. We had this chair, an easy chair with rounded arms, and a cushion you could toss out onto the floor, if you wanted. To tiny me, it was HUGE. It was potential. In it, I could be in my own world. I could sit in it with my back against its sturdy red back, and my feet wouldn’t even hang over the front edge in my earliest memory. I devoured many a book hugged by that chair. I could tilt the seat cushion up to fill the space between the arms, and I had a room. I could sit or curl up or stand up in that little room, and it was – unlike any other – all my own. My own place! Youngest, by years, of five Merrill children, all of the rest of them big, all skilled at stuff I wasn’t, all much more important than I. My “own” was usually shared, or hand-me-down, or what was left over. The chair’s shelter of me was my unique privilege. The gifts of being tiny were few, and I reveled in this one. I still remember a nightmare of sorts I had about this chair. So very vivid were the scenes in it that they still appear when I hit the “recall” button. I dreamed I was sleeping on the couch in the same room as the chair, and I woke to find a giant sitting in the chair. It fit him just right – he filled it, but it fit him, so gigantic I found it to be in my mind. But as is the way of dreams, the scene had a sort of sense to it. The giant wanted to cook me. He produced a tiny little cast iron fry pan and asked me to climb into it. He was ready to set the pan (once I got into it) on the top of the fireplace tool rack, which he was to use as a sort of burner to cook me up for his supper. I was quite frightened and burst into tears, asking him to reconsider. I think, as I awoke, that he did indeed relent, and agreed that he needn’t have me for his supper. I think that dream has stayed with me for more than 40 years because of the importance of that Big Red Chair in my young life. So hugely important, it was, to my small self.
Steve:
Steve:
When I was a very little, before I can remember it, my dad was in the military. He and my mother went to Japan once, and one of the things they brought back was a small, black, carved wooden cabinet with three or four drawers--the whole thing only a foot and a half high or so. It sat on the hearth in the house where I grew up. In the drawers were various souvenirs that they also brought home from that trip--a little container with grains of rice that had tiny faces painted on them, a silkworm cocoon, and other objects that seemed rather magical. There was also a box or two of incense, so the drawers had an inviting, sweet smell. I don't remember anything new ever being added to the cabinet, nor anything being removed. Sometimes I would sit on the hearth and look through each little drawer, taking out each item and then storing them away again. My father still has the cabinet although I have not looked inside for a long time...I have told him that someday I want to have it. I wonder if I will feel like adding to or removing any of its contents.
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