MY THOUGHTS THE OTHER DAY
turned to my grandparents, and more specifically to my grandparents’ house. It
was a farmhouse, wood framed, with a long front hall with the living room,
which was seldom used except at Christmas.
There was a fireplace in the hall, with doors to two bedrooms on one side
of the hall and one on the other. Two of the bedrooms had fireplaces that fed
into the same chimney as the one in the hall. A door at the end of the hall
opened to the sleeping porch and a large dining room, also used mainly on
holidays or when my grandmother cooked for the farmhands, and a kitchen.
The kitchen, which seemed so large when I was a child, was no larger than
the kitchen in our cottage in National Village. It had only a few cabinets,
swing out bins for flour and cornmeal, a built-in pie safe, and linoleum
counter tops. Yet here my grandmother cooked, often for a multitude, and canned
the produce of her garden.
WHAT WAS STRIKING about the
house, at least retrospectively, was the paucity of closet space. The house
was, of course, built without an architect and perhaps without any drawn up
plans, certainly none that my grandmother saw before the house was nearly
complete. As children, we were told that Memaw, as we called her, had told my
grandfather that one thing she wanted in the new house was closets, something
many houses of the era did not have.
We were told she never even looked at the new house until it was finished
or nearly finished. Her request for closets either had not gotten communicated
or had been ignored. My grandmother was one of the gentlest souls I have ever
known, but she was not spineless. She put her foot down, and the carpenters
carved out closet space in the nearly completed house. The closets were tiny
and the fact that they were added afterwards was obvious.
As it turned out, the closets were more than adequate after their
children were grown and gone. My grandmother had maybe two or three Sunday
dresses and my grandfather had maybe one suit and a pair of dress shoes.
The closets in our cottage are cavernous compared to the ones in that old
house, and still we have clothing packed away in boxes.
WHEN WE DOWNSIZED our space,
we did not downsize our possessions proportionately. We are still working
through ridding ourselves of possessions we seldom or ever need. And we are
trying not to add new stuff. I don’t think we ever felt more liberated than we
did when we were younger and living for a short time on a boat with out two
young sons. Space on the boat was finite, and if you added something new, it
was necessary to get rid of something old. We remembered that lesson for a
while after we returned to the “real” world, but gradually the lesson faded.
All of this came to mind was I was driving home from shopping for
Christmas presents. Adelaide and I really had no great wishes for things this
year, so we decided to buy gifts for the children at the Girls Ranch. Many of
our National Village neighbors joined in the effort. Adelaide’s sister had said
she has everything she needs, so we’re adding what we would have spent on a
present for her to the money for the Girl Ranch residents.
I HAD GOTTEN a copy of the
residents’ Christmas Wish Lists, and what struck us and our neighbors was how
modest their wishes were. I guess that is what started my train of thought
rolling. My grandparents did not feel deprived because their possessions were
modest. Living on the boat, we found that there were few things that were truly
essential. We are trying to re-learn that lesson, difficult though it may be.
Meanwhile, if forgoing adding to our possessions and give a little happiness to
some kids who have been dealt a pretty bad hand, it brightens the season for
all of us.
Bill Brown is a retired newspaper editor whose
newspapers won a Pulitzer Prize, National Headliners Award, Edgar Willis
Scripps Award for Distinguished Service to the First Amendment and Associated
Press Managing Editors Public Service and Freedom of Information Awards. He is
the author of “Yellow Cat, Hendry & Me: Dispatches From Life’s Front Lines.
He can be reached at bill@williamblakebrown.com
