By the time I was five my mom had remarried my step-dad and we were buying our own home. It was around the corner from our rental and it had TWO stories. And you know how it was in the 80’s, people made some bold choices. We had blue carpet. We had floral wallpaper. We had a balcony that was the size of the entire garage on which it sat. In the corner of the balcony was a hot tub that never really worked, it had fake grass that we would lay our towels on hoping for a small amount of a tan before the heat would smoke us out. For five minutes it was like we were in Vegas, Strawberry Wine blaring from our boombox, until we were just too hot and had to hose ourselves down. We once had a desert tortoise and it liked the sun so much we left it on that balcony in that heat we could hardly stand. Later that night we came to get it and we had baked the tortoise to death which is illegal for many reasons, one of them being that it was an endangered species. These are the regular traumas of childhood.
Everything in our house was a cat walk of sorts. The stairs curled around the center of the house so that you could start at the front door, curve around the open staircase, pass the master, two bedrooms and a bathroom and walk the bridge to the last bedroom and never once lose sight of the front door. Below the curving staircase was a garden bed the size of a king mattress. We had plants growing in until my mom left the hose on and flooded our whole house. We sloshed around the house with water up to our ankles in shock of the pool our house had become. In response, the fire department came with their lights flashing, which was the greatest horror to my mom (“did they really need to have the lights on, for goodness sake!”). My sister Hayley, always the extrovert, passed around homemade brownies to the hardworking boys shop vac-ing the pool out of our dining room.
After that we chose to fill the garden with concrete while also re-carpeting the house after the damages of the flood, so we switched our school blue carpet (can you believe someone chose that color), for a teal green (clearly a much better choice). We retiled the linoleum with white tile and my mom was a slave to the white grout which she regularly cleaned with a toothbrush. We didn’t have the money to do all of the renovations at once so we lived on concrete for six months. It was such a big deal to live like peasants in that way, camping in our own home. My home now that we own and renovated has treated concrete as a permanent floor choice, it’s a bizarre cultural progression, I’ll admit.
My favorite part of our house was our patio room. Which was exactly as it sounds, a patio that was walled in with floor to ceiling windows. It was part storage, part patio dining, part craft area. Most importantly though, it was the place where the epic saga of the widows and their children played out. My sisters and I had a flair for the dramatic, and we liked dolls and dress up. My mom had this thick silk nightgown that went down to the floor and was in one moment a wedding dress and in another the queen’s day dress. We would wander around the house in these oversized gowns and act like we were crossing countries, weary from our journey. We would hold our dolls tightly in our arms, protecting them from the cruelties of this world and more practically protecting them from that harsh wind we had imagined. Ducking our heads into our chests and holding our bundled dolls close, we were survivors. Every moment was a tragedy as we trudged down the stairs like migrants across foreign lands. We made it with great relief to the patio room where we would camp like widows just waiting for that letter from our war-torn husbands. My mom would call us in for meals on Saturdays, but other than that, our days were lived out in another land. From the safety of our home we transformed our inner worlds into unknown places and endless dramas. All day long we lived these other lives, without a hint of boredom we lived as story-tellers inside our own narratives. It was all adventure, love, loss, fear, protection, the big moments of life, played out against the backdrops of storage bins and crafting stamps.
For most of us, real life never lives up to the drama of our imaginations as children. My life will never have quite as much adventure as what I lived in that room of windows. Thank God for that. But then sometimes, I watch movies just because I miss it.