I looked up our childhood home on Zillow today – technology is amazing! It is listed as “4 BD – 2.5 BA – 1,881 sqft”

WHAAA???

Two questions immediately come to mind: First, how did they come up with that configuration? And second, how is that house – the big house I grew up in – just 53 square feet bigger than the tiny, over-stuffed rambler I live in today?

Admittedly, the cape cod that our parents purchased in 1972 had a very odd design. At least I thought so, until I started perusing the interwebs this morning. First, I learned that the upstairs dormer windows, the ones which stand so central in my childhood – are not what determines the cape cod architectural style.  Those dormers were a later addition to the original cape cod, which according to Wiki were added to “increase the usable space in a loft and to create window openings in a roof plane.” The original cape cod design was marked by a gabled roof and large central chimney.  An interesting side-note: it was designed that way “to withstand the stormy weather of Cape Cod.” Well, they got that part right. Our house certainly withstood its share of storms.

There were two sets of stairs in our home. Both central. One went up to the girls’ domain. One went down to Gram’s. The main level was the jurisdiction of our parents. The main level was also where the kitchen, the one full bathroom, the formal living room (used only on Christmas morning), the dining room (used only on Thanksgiving Day), and later the family room (a.k.a. the “New Room”) were located but unless we were eating, for the bulk of my time there, these were all simply avenues we girls had to cross to get to upstairs to safety or downstairs to the laundry. We may have entered and escaped by the back door, but Upstairs was where we lived.   

Upstairs was our haven. Parental units went up there only to wreak havoc. In the ten years I lived there, I remember mom coming up only once or twice, usually to complain about the disorderliness of the central hall closet which contained all the household linens. I don’t remember Gram ever stepping foot up there. And Dad? Dad was the one who would slither up those stairs like a cobra, usually while we were not present, to rend and destroy. Always seeking some damning evidence of our rebellion, our betrayal of the family cleanliness code, or some other made up excuse. At least that’s how I remember it.

But none of that makes sense. I mean it was the 70s. Kids were raised differently back then. But we were 8, 5 and 3 when we moved to the Big House. Surely, our mom came upstairs more? Or maybe she didn’t. My memories of her engagement with the Upstairs are her standing at the bottom of the stairs yelling up to us to bring this down, take that up, come and eat, get in the shower, and – our favorite! – “Girls, pack your bags, we are leaving!!” OY.

The stairs to Upstairs were lined with beautiful dark paneling. Not the cheap crap they call “wood paneling” today. This was the real deal. Tongue and groove. Real wood. Floor to ceiling. Remember, the house was built in 1948, the cheap stuff did not exist yet. We knew the house was old when we moved in, but that dark rich paneling made it feel positively ancient. It’s funny to realize now that the house I own today was older than my childhood home when we bought it fourteen years ago.

Anyway, you had to open a door to get to the stairway to Upstairs. On your way up, the unwritten rule was to grab whatever was left on the bottom stairs and take it with you. Being the oldest, I usually ignored it, unless it was mine. Let the Littles carry that up. Besides, I liked to run my right hand along the paneling on my way up. I liked the feel of the click, click, click on my nails. At the top of the stairs there was door on the right – my room! – and a window directly in front of you. I know from my Wiki reading today that was a gable window. I didn’t know that then. Back then, it was the lookout window. From there, you could see what the weather was like, look down at our camper trailer and the old wooden building we called the garage, or through the trees to Miss Gladys’ house. She was our kindly, elderly neighbor who lived next door. Her house was even older than ours and filled with fragile treasures and old smells. I loved her, even though the other neighborhood kids thought she was a witch.

At any rate, besides checking the weather, the lookout window was really only important or used on the weekends. Because that was when you needed to look out and see what dad was up to. If he was in your line of vision, and not working on a vehicle, chances are it meant that he was coming up with some sort of chore for us girls to do. If he wasn’t in view, it could mean that he was doing yard work that we should be helping with or drinking in the back yard.  It was tricky.             

Back to the top of the stairs… you could turn right and walk through the doorway ONLY if your name was Debbi, if you were invited, or you were the incorrigible snake who happened to be paying the mortgage on that doorway. All other humans had to turn to the left and be about their business. Turn left and you walked along the landing, past the dormer attic door, which had a magical alcove just the right size for a small table with a mini-Christmas tree on it and a bean bag for reading or gazing at the tree, past the hall linen closet – which was HUGE – and up to the door leading to Sheesh and Peeper’s rooms. I had the run of the whole Upstairs because walking through Sheesh’s bedroom was the only way to the half-bath. And, did I mention I was the oldest?

Peeper commented on my last post “We didn’t have our own rooms – dad put the wall up – and I was in the L that was so small you had to walk over the bed to get to the window.” The second part of that is true. Before dad became a cobra he built a wall that turned one gigantic room into one large room and one small one. Was there a folding accordion door that separated the two rooms? I am not sure. If there was, we didn’t use it. Or maybe we broke it. At any rate, originally, that entire room was the size of nearly half the house, minus the bathroom and dormer attics that ran on both sides of the house. Dad broke the room into two rooms – and while Peeper may have felt like that wasn’t a real room, it felt like it was to me. Either way, we went from Peep having her own toddler room all the way upstairs at the old house and Sheesh and I sharing the basement, to the three of us together Upstairs, each with our own space, at the new house.   

In between Sheesh and Peep’s rooms and my room was a large walk-through closet. Not walk-in. Walk-through. Like, you literally could walk through the closet from one half of the house to the other. Mom and dad put a divider between the two poles which held our hung clothes to keep us from running through it, but it didn’t go all the way to the back of the closet, so we turned that tiny space into a private hidey-hole.

There was no air conditioning in the new house. Mom and dad put a window unit in their bedroom, but we girls were left to our own devices when it came to staying cool in the hot Alexandrian summers.  We became very creative. We’d open the two gable windows, to get a cross breeze and then stick a fan in the one in Sheesh’s room blowing IN. Then we secured a sheet to the top of the fan by closing the window onto it, so that the sheet was filled with air, and then by adding more sheets and blankets, we’d turn Sheesh’s 400 sq foot room into one giant tent-air-tunnel. It was always fun until the damn fan would fall out and knock someone in the head. But we did this summer after summer and lived to tell the tale.

To be continued….