Modifying the Prescription
Now on shaky emotional ground and desperate to create comfort with my surroundings, I try to turn my home (built in 1983) into my grandmother’s (pictured below) from nostalgic memories of it when I was a small child.
Continuing from Part Two…
While the Homer Laughlin china I had collected was reminiscent of the quiet, comforting ambiance of Grandma’s (my paternal grandmother) 1930s bungalow, the Noritake (a beautiful but dissatisfactory choice for my purpose) was supposed to be a reminder of the amazing wonders of Grandmommy’s (my maternal grandmother) 1920s Foursquare[i]. The two homes were only about six blocks from each other, but they could not have been more different. The bungalow was modest, but well kept, with a comforting ambiance; the Foursquare was once elegant and impressive, but deteriorating, with a disquieting air.
I was only eleven when I saw Grandmommy’s house for the last time, and the time before that, only seven. Even so, I was overcome with a sense of irretrievable loss when that house was torn down in 1964. I was seventeen.
***
I had been looking for a plain cream-colored English porcelain with a thin line in a particular shade of red around the rim—Grandmommy’s “breakfast dishes”—that I had admired but that she would never use. She kept them on the top row of the glass-front cabinets of her butler’s pantry. The pantry was L-shaped, with the short side to the right of the entry from the kitchen, the long side straight ahead, and the open entryway to the dining room on the wall opposite the short side. Cabinets ran the length of the “L”, except for a space in the corner with a small window that was too high for me to see through as a child. A continuous L-shaped red linoleum countertop ran the length of both walls, tying everything together.
I loved the glass-front doors on the upper cabinets that displayed her beautiful china, and the painted doors on the base cabinets that hid all sorts of interesting things. Cereal boxes and other supplies were in the cabinets on the short side nearest the kitchen. Grandmommy wouldn’t let me touch anything in there, but once she let me sit on the floor in front of the cabinets on the long side and drag out all the baking paraphernalia that probably hadn’t been used since the maid left.
To get to that enthralling pantry, I ran the length of her kitchen from the front hall entry to the swinging door that was so much fun to shove open as I ran through at the other end. I had to run because Grandmommy’s cat, nearly as old as she was, had been using the small enclosed porch off the kitchen, “kitty-corner” from the hallway entry—the door to which was always cracked open for him—as his private potty. That room probably hadn’t been attended to since the last time Mom visited.
If not for the stench, I would have loved spending time in that wonderful kitchen. It occupied most of the right rear quadrant of the Foursquare.
Except for the space needed at either end for door swings, the long exterior wall was completely filled with a line of contiguous paned windows that met a countertop (a “standing work counter” of red linoleum with painted cabinets below, like the one in her pantry), and she had a darling little electric stove with a pull-chain light. (My grandfather had owned Omaha’s first electric company, but he had died years earlier).
A small enameled metal table filled the short wall between the doors to the pantry and the porch, and a red plastic electric clock with its cord hanging down to the outlet below ticked quietly above it. An unobtrusive “maid’s entry” door was in the corner opposite the door to the porch, on the same wall as the hall entry. A refrigerator stood between the hall entry and the maid’s door, as close to the maid’s door as possible, blocking it from view. It must have made the maid’s appearance in the kitchen seem magical, as she suddenly appeared beside the refrigerator from the unseen door. That door opened to a “secret” stairway to the upstairs. The maid’s tiny pie-shaped turned stairs, completely walled-in and so narrow at the pivot I could not step near there, provided endless entertainment when I was five.
The staircase in my grandmother’s house was one of the few places I remember pretending as a child… I would walk down the carpeted stairs slowly with my head held high and look straight ahead, anticipating the view to the side yard through the large window at the landing below (which I couldn’t see through until I was more than halfway down), and then either turn right, go down a few steps, stop at another smaller landing, check my appearance in what my mother said was a “preparation mirror” (as if I could really see myself in it), then turn right again, go a few more steps down, and make my entrance into the living room, pretending I was my mother, ready to receive a gentleman caller—or else, I would turn left.
The left side of the landing had a smaller opening onto an extension of the main landing. Turning left again from that extension and then down one stair took me to three triangular steps that turned to the right, then to a single stair, where I switched from hugging the left wall (where the steps had been the widest), to the right wall, in preparation for two much narrower pie-shaped stairs that turned to the left (with the widest part of the stair on my right). I hugged the walls because there was no railing. At the last step, I’d look quickly through the small window on my right, to the side yard, then pretend I was the maid as I entered the kitchen.
There was no space between the floor and the door where the knob was (the wide part of the stair was by the hinge [see diagram]), so I had to move to the narrow part on the left and reach forward to open the door from the last step, difficult when I was so little, or the door would smack me in the face. It just added to the uniqueness of the house.
From 1949 through 1956, we visited the grandmas often, and their homes, especially Grandmommy’s, left an indelible impression on me. Then, in my late forties, when my life began to fall apart, I wanted anything that reminded me of that house and its furnishings in my own home. Except for the coffee table in her living room.
Grandmommy used to go antique shopping in Europe, and she had filled her house with the things she bought. Experiencing her home was probably what instilled such a taste for antiques and other uncommon furnishings in me. Except for coffee tables. My older brother liked to tease me about Grandmommy’s coffee table. He thought it was funny that I was so afraid of it.
That coffee table was undoubtedly valuable, but my mother also hated it. She said that when she was a child, the maid wasn’t allowed to touch it, so it was her job to clean all the crevices very carefully with a toothbrush and never miss a spot. That table had heavy mahogany legs with dragons and other horrifying monsters carved into them. It terrified me as a child when I had to sit on the floor—as far away from it as I could get—while Grandmommy sat in “her chair” under the cracked and caving-in plaster ceiling to watch me. She had to make sure I didn’t break anything. (My brother always had free run of the house, and Grandmommy never yelled at him, no matter what he broke)!
***
Never finding those breakfast dishes, I chose to collect a nearly insane number of other reminders, instead, and incorporated everything I could that was reminiscent of that enchanting home into my own.
Grandmommy’s dining room had a mahogany tea cart next to the wall that was perpendicular to the pantry doorway and just to the right of elegant French doors that opened into the sunroom. The cart had a set of children’s play china on top that I could touch, and an ivory mahjong set below that I wanted to touch, but couldn’t.
Two sets of mahjong (neither in ivory, and neither quite matching what she had) are now stashed in the game closet of our rec room.
A tea cart, similar to my grandmother’s
(Photo by author)
and a man’s antique dresser top that I deemed suitable for a child’s china cabinet (with a set of children’s china dishes in it, of course) sit in our dining room.
(Photo by author)
However, remembering how I’d hated the cheap and easily bent aluminum flatware that came with play dishes when I was a child, I scoured the antique shops for something nicer to go with my recently acquired antique children’s china. I bought twelve pearl-handled butter knives and eight sterling silver strawberry forks and demi-tassse spoons (even though I only had china for six).
(Photo by author)
***
In the summertime, my brother and I slept in the sleeping room above the sunroom. It had floor-to-ceiling screens on three sides and held three double beds in a row. My brother and I usually fought over the bed on the far left that had the best view of downtown Omaha, but sometimes he’d just give up and let me lie with him—to his right, of course—so we could look out together and marvel at the city lights.
But in the wintertime, we slept in what used to be (before Grandpa died and Grandmommy moved into the bedroom with the bay window) my grandparents’ adjoining corner bedrooms. Hers (the one I slept in) was the upper left quadrant, while his was the upper right. They met at the center of the house and were separated by a heavy drape that I enjoyed closing. I loved that I could lie in bed and read, and then when I was ready to sleep, just reach over and push the button on the wall beside my bed to turn off the ceiling light—that’s if I hadn’t already quietly snuck back through the drape into my brother’s room to read Buster Brown comics under the covers with him. We always asked to take the stairs in that bedroom up to the attic, but were never allowed to open the door. Mom said it wasn’t safe.
In my continuing effort to turn my home into my grandmother’s, I bought antique light fixtures for almost every room (and several extras because they were so cool) and installed push-button switches from Classic Accents, Inc., like the one I could reach from the bed at Grandmommy’s.
I found European lace for our bathroom window, but it’s surprising that I did that. The most memorable thing about the lace in my grandmother’s home was not its delicacy; it was the nauseating smell of dust as I sat on the sofa in front of it. But I sat there, anyway, because that window looked out onto the large front porch with the swing that I enjoyed banging into the banister until someone from within yelled, “Not so hard, Edith Jane!”
In 1995, I hired a carpenter to add an old-fashioned bump-out to our kitchen, remove the 1980s-style fake ceiling beams in the family room, and install six Victorian windows (like the ones in the bump-out) with sconces in between them.
(Photo by author)
I wanted to channel the ambience of my grandmother’s sunroom. My brother and I had spent many happy afternoons in that sunroom playing Scrabble with her while cardinals pecked at the sunflower seeds in the feeder mounted to the house just outside the screen door. There are now two Scrabble sets that we never use in our game closet, but I eventually removed the bird feeder I’d hung on the small porch off our morning room. (Spilled seeds so close to the house attracted too many mice).
Not yet satisfied, I refinished an old china cabinet like the one that Grandmommy had packed with old toys and games for us to rummage through in the long-deserted servants’ quarters of her basement.
We thought the servants’ quarters were wonderful. They had a separate entrance from the outside (with a badly warped door that wouldn’t open), a fireplace in the main (and only, as I recall) room, and in the back, near the stairs, was a filthy sink and toilet (that Mommy warned us not to use) in a half-finished space barely big enough to hold them. Actually, the entire basement was filthy, with boxes of old Victrola records and junk stacked on an overloaded sofa that was propped up against a bare concrete wall with a dirty window above, and trash everywhere. But as kids, we thought it was the best place ever to play and talked about what it must have been like to have live-in servants and never have to do any work.
When, after I’d pleaded for years, my husband finally agreed to a complete kitchen renovation, I immediately bashed in all the soffits with a small sledgehammer from the workshop before he could change his mind. We converted our 1980s kitchen to a 1920s style with painted-white glass-front cabinetry, vintage accoutrements, a red plastic clock I ordered from Sundance, a pull-chain light with a green bauble (like the one on my grandmother’s stove) over the sink, and a three-rod tea towel holder of green glass (like the one on the wall by her sink).
I wanted my kitchen to look like a kitchen, not an extension of the family room with appliances.
I hung draperies in doorways, like the ones in my grandmother’s bedroom and at the top of her stairs, and eventually rehired that same carpenter to install French doors in two different rooms. Then, copying what he did, I replaced most of the trim work in the house myself (husband helped until he got fed up) and sewed vintage-style window treatments.
The pièce de résistance was my version of a “secret” entrance to the kitchen (via the family room, unfortunately) several years later. We “modified” what had been one of the Victorian windows in the family room when we put an addition on the house in 2007.
The opening is only nineteen inches wide (we did this after the inspection, of course), and one has to look quite closely from the other side to realize that one of the “windows” on either side of the fireplace is actually a door!
I had filled my house with relics of what I imagined were happier days, but it wasn’t enough to fill the void in me. I needed to find a way out of my job (the thing that I blamed for the emptiness I felt) and do something completely different. If I had known then that I could teach piano, I would have done it, but I didn’t.
What I did know was that I could sew and that I liked lots of little things. When I discovered that handmade bag in Geneva, IL, with all the chains and dangles, I thought I’d found a way out.
I began collecting tapestry fabrics in 3-yard cuttings.
Then came the more difficult search for the dangly things. I found them, but not in the quantities I wanted. Then, in 1994, I discovered The Company.
[Part Four – Building an Inventory]
No, Wait! I missed the beginning!!
[i] The Foursquare was a popular house design in the early 1900’s. See https://www.bobvilla.com/articles/65-house-style-foursquare for a lovely overview. (When my grandmother’s Foursquare was torn down in 1964, it was replaced with a parking lot).