Yesterday I got one of those rare and wonderful things that you get when you work in education and your kids are too young to be in school yet – a day off. It was Rosh Hoshana, so no school for me, but daycare and work for everyone else. What luxury – being alone in the house. And how did I spend my time – perhaps pampering myself with a long bath and a sneak at daytime TV? No – better! I ripped down 4 layers of wallpaper in the bathroom! It started out as an innocent tug at a corner exposed by removing a switch plate and I discovered that the bottom layer – a linen backed fake grass cloth number could be pulled loose fairly easily. So I pulled and sure enough I could peel all 4 layers at once. This was an incredibly satisfying moment until I realized that along with the wallpaper I was also taking off portions of the drywall. Oops. I hadn’t intended for this to turn into a larger project than necessary, but once I started, I just couldn’t stop. The layers on top of the fake grass cloth included a speckled blue and gold pattern, with a pink and yellow foil motif on top of that and finally the top layer – a thoroughly boring white on beige/vaguely opalescent, slightly textured fan design that made me wonder whether the previous owner had had some rip-roaring time at a Holiday Inn (possibly a Holidome) at some point in the 80’s and immediately rushed home to recreate the same bathroom look right in her own home.
While this was going on, the air duct cleaners arrived and set to work removing air return covers and hooking up tubes and vacuums. At one point during my wallpaper ripping frenzy, a collective “WHOA!!!” came through the air vent in the bathroom. When I went downstairs to investigate, the crew leader explained they had seen a gigantic ball of hair and dust and crud come through the clear tube that was so big, he said it looked like a small dog.
Later they came upstairs and showed me another discovery – an old, opened pack of Marlboros had been found lodged inside one of the registers in the dining room. Close to the kitchen door, we could only speculate that someone may have stashed them there and when the coast was clear would steal away outside for an unsanctioned smoke. But who? We know some about the family that lived here previously. A couple with an only son, the father died rather early – while the son was still in High School. Could the father have been ill and told that he needed to quit smoking? Could it have been the son? Shortly after we moved in, we dismantled a built-in seating unit in the basement. It was hinged so that you could lift the seat and store things inside. We discovered the words “I hate you” scrawled in pencil on one of the interior panels, harking back that awful and vivid moment in Sybil when her Psychiatrist discovers the purple crayon scrawled on the inside of the potato bin and realizes that Sybil’s mother had been stuffing her inside for inappropriate behavior. Maybe Jr. was a rebel. Or perhaps Shirley herself? Was it during the pink and yellow bathroom period or the fake grass cloth phase. It is odd to think of these secrets that were hidden away and discovered so many years later by complete strangers who are in no way directly impacted by them.
Growing up, my family used to refer to rooms in our house by names linked to different periods in our lives. There was a red rug room called as such long after the red rug had been replaced. A guest room was forever called Maya’s room for years after our foreign exchange student had gone back to the Philippines. Will we follow suit? Will we go through a Lyndhurst Timber period (the paint color we are considering for our bedroom)? Perhaps not, but I imagine that we will remember snapshots of our surroundings as we recall pivotal events.
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