i took pictures of houses
I have been cleaning my bedroom today, for it is sorely in need of a good scouring and shaping-up -- or at least I am trying to, but I keep getting distracted by things like the book I was reading and then a library trip because I had books come in and I didn't want to make the librarians hang onto them until Saturday, which is Banui's Official Library Day -- and sometimes when I am in a certain position or I catch a certain smell or angle of the light I remember things.
My house is full of ghosts.
They're nice ghosts, though. It's a very odd thing, living in a house you knew intimately before it belonged to you. It's a strange thing to have the same house you remember, with the carpets and the wallpaper and the same creaking boards, but the furniture is wrong and the people are wrong and the smells are wrong and now that everything's re-arranged even the light comes in differently and the colours are not the same. Sometimes I am standing at the window in my bedroom and then there is this -- ghost -- of me, of yesterday-me, on a fold-out foam chair under the same window, or I'm at the door and there are ghosts of Sarah and I standing awkwardly in the doorway the first time I came here, talking very loudly and excitedly, and how very much younger we were, and what different people. Sometimes there is a ghost of Mrs M stirring something in a cauldron on the stove (she really does use cauldrons, sometimes), or of three of us girls and our mothers sitting cross-legged in the living room discussing literature (and somehow politics always got into our conversations). There are ghosts of days: once we came stumbling through the back door singing, home late from a movie, and tromped upstairs to the little girls' room -- my sisters' room, now -- to tell Mrs M all about it. Once there was a costume party at the church next door (this is the rectory), and someone dug a dress out of the attic for me to wear -- I still have it; it's an old GunneSax dress, and probably used to be more blue than grey, and it looks a bit like an 1840s ball-gown -- and I borrowed Mrs M's makeup and did my hair in the mirror in the hall (which I always liked to peer into; something about that mirror and the lighting of the hall always made me look so much prettier than I do in other mirrors). When I first came here, most of the younger children were running up and down the stairs with wooden pistols and swords, playing something that might have been cowboys or pirates or both. I slept in the attic once, and we watched The Princess Bride on a little television with wonky colour.
It's the nicest house I've ever lived in, although most people would probably think the last house I lived in was better, but that one had no character (except in that it was built by someone who never actually lived in houses and didn't have a family, hence the two kitchens, neither of which really worked the way one kitchen should have, and the ridiculously tiny closets, and the rooms which were all very dark), and this one is a hundred years old and my closet has two or three layers of wallpaper and a stained glass window and in some places paint is peeling which really shouldn't be appealing at all but it is to me. People used to live in this house -- I wonder about them, and what they saw, a hundred years ago, peering out of windows that now belong to me -- and once one of them came back to visit, and she stood in our back-yard and told about how she used to go up to play on the hill, and where her bedroom used to be, when it was hers.
Funny, that the ghosts are such nice ones, and yet I sometimes feel pangs of loss when they come. I don't know what the loss is for -- the Meholicks don't live more than a few miles away now, and I am happier to be in this house than I have been in any other, happy to be living in it and not just visiting from time to time -- but it is there all the same. Perhaps I don't like things changing, except that I am glad about lots of changes, about living here in this house which has lots of light, where the downstairs hall turns gold when the sun sets and in my bedroom there are gold flecks all over the wall and the dresser coming between the shadows of tree branches, where I am close enough to ride all over town on my bicycle, where there are beautiful old trees on either side of the front walk. Perhaps I just want to get into the-way-things-were for a little while, despite them being better now. I don't know. It's raining and I'm going to go read a book.
My house is full of ghosts.
They're nice ghosts, though. It's a very odd thing, living in a house you knew intimately before it belonged to you. It's a strange thing to have the same house you remember, with the carpets and the wallpaper and the same creaking boards, but the furniture is wrong and the people are wrong and the smells are wrong and now that everything's re-arranged even the light comes in differently and the colours are not the same. Sometimes I am standing at the window in my bedroom and then there is this -- ghost -- of me, of yesterday-me, on a fold-out foam chair under the same window, or I'm at the door and there are ghosts of Sarah and I standing awkwardly in the doorway the first time I came here, talking very loudly and excitedly, and how very much younger we were, and what different people. Sometimes there is a ghost of Mrs M stirring something in a cauldron on the stove (she really does use cauldrons, sometimes), or of three of us girls and our mothers sitting cross-legged in the living room discussing literature (and somehow politics always got into our conversations). There are ghosts of days: once we came stumbling through the back door singing, home late from a movie, and tromped upstairs to the little girls' room -- my sisters' room, now -- to tell Mrs M all about it. Once there was a costume party at the church next door (this is the rectory), and someone dug a dress out of the attic for me to wear -- I still have it; it's an old GunneSax dress, and probably used to be more blue than grey, and it looks a bit like an 1840s ball-gown -- and I borrowed Mrs M's makeup and did my hair in the mirror in the hall (which I always liked to peer into; something about that mirror and the lighting of the hall always made me look so much prettier than I do in other mirrors). When I first came here, most of the younger children were running up and down the stairs with wooden pistols and swords, playing something that might have been cowboys or pirates or both. I slept in the attic once, and we watched The Princess Bride on a little television with wonky colour.
It's the nicest house I've ever lived in, although most people would probably think the last house I lived in was better, but that one had no character (except in that it was built by someone who never actually lived in houses and didn't have a family, hence the two kitchens, neither of which really worked the way one kitchen should have, and the ridiculously tiny closets, and the rooms which were all very dark), and this one is a hundred years old and my closet has two or three layers of wallpaper and a stained glass window and in some places paint is peeling which really shouldn't be appealing at all but it is to me. People used to live in this house -- I wonder about them, and what they saw, a hundred years ago, peering out of windows that now belong to me -- and once one of them came back to visit, and she stood in our back-yard and told about how she used to go up to play on the hill, and where her bedroom used to be, when it was hers.
Funny, that the ghosts are such nice ones, and yet I sometimes feel pangs of loss when they come. I don't know what the loss is for -- the Meholicks don't live more than a few miles away now, and I am happier to be in this house than I have been in any other, happy to be living in it and not just visiting from time to time -- but it is there all the same. Perhaps I don't like things changing, except that I am glad about lots of changes, about living here in this house which has lots of light, where the downstairs hall turns gold when the sun sets and in my bedroom there are gold flecks all over the wall and the dresser coming between the shadows of tree branches, where I am close enough to ride all over town on my bicycle, where there are beautiful old trees on either side of the front walk. Perhaps I just want to get into the-way-things-were for a little while, despite them being better now. I don't know. It's raining and I'm going to go read a book.