My grandparents’ house wasn’t just walls and floors and windows. It was a container of experiences, feelings, odors and memories.
And blankets, lots and lots of blankets.
To this day there’s something very cozy about sleeping in a cold room with the weight of many blankets lying on top of me.
My grandparent’s house was an old farm house in rural Michigan. I’m told the original part of the house was put up in the late 1800s with later additions including a hand-dug “Michigan basement” (a dirt-floor basement with walls made of stones collected on the property).
Until a fire destroyed all but the exterior walls in the mid-1970s, the only heat came from a basement wood stove and its single large vent in the floor between the kitchen and dining room. This gravity heating system made for a toasty dining experience, but the bedrooms that were placed on the outer edges of the house and upstairs, were quite frosty in the cold seasons.
On the main floor there were two bedrooms referred to as the South Bedroom (grandma and grandpa’s) and the North Bedroom where I would sometimes sleep.
All of the beds had several layers of blankets and they were quite effective. I’ve always been a more hot than cold person. I suffer in the summer and relish fall and winter when my body finally feels like it has reached equilibrium.
In the chilled North Bedroom, with my cold nose poking out from under a pile of blankets and quilts, I had the best dreams of my life. Most of those boyhood dreams involved some far-north adventure complete with a blizzard, a husky and a cabin.
I suppose every house has an odor, pleasant or not. I’ve heard from countless people about their memories of the way their grandparent’s houses smelled. That’s not unique. My memories are unique in that my grandparents were hoarders, before that diagnosis existed. So the fragrance I remember is of cardboard. Various kinds and thicknesses of cardboard. Old cardboard. Wet and dry cardboard. It created quite the aroma. It wasn’t necessarily bad, but it was one that I’ve haven’t since encountered.
Before the fire I was fascinated by a dimmer switch that controlled the overhead light in the dining room. It was one of those round knobs that you first pushed in and then rotated to adjust the intensity of the light. To a little boy that was like a rocket ship control! I would walk by and turn it just a little bit, trying to change the lighting without getting the adults upset. I’d usually get a stern look from my mom or worse. I got many hours of play out of that simple dimmer control.
My mom was one of the last of a class to be educated in a rural one-room schoolhouse. As the old schoolhouses closed my grandfather would get the slate chalk boards. One of those slate boards hung in the dining room and kept my cousins and I occupied while the adults discussed their troubles. Grandpa had given my parents one of the boards as well and it hung in our basement and was by and large in my own play area. I still have our slate board, but the one at grandma’s house was different because it was so in the open and in the adults’ space.
I would draw terrible pictures and enjoy inhaling the chalk dust. In fact I loved chalk dust so much I drew with much more intensity than necessary just to get a heavy coating on the board. Then I would load up the eraser and take it outside to beat it against the side of the barn and enjoy the chalk dust cloud. I’m sure that has done something evil to my health, but at the time nobody gave it a thought.
I also remember the large claw-foot dining room table. It was enormous and very ornate. For some years I was able to walk around under it. In fact during the fire the entire roof of the house collapsed on top of that table and the table did not break nor burn.
Even when I was too tall to take walks under that table I would spend considerable time studying the claw feet. I didn’t realize it at the time but the large knuckles and nails and feathers on those claw feet probably were my earliest study of woodworking.
The old house also had a root cellar. While the house had electricity all comers were instilled with a mortal fear should they use or waste it. Heaven help you if you did something to cause the “light bill” to be increased by even a penny! So even in modern days, with a refrigerator and a couple of large freezers to keep the products of their large gardens, the root cellar was an important part of their life.
I was terrified of the root cellar. It was cold and damp and dark. The potatoes had eyes growing out like the tentacles of some evil underground devil ready to wrap around the devour me. No, grandma, you can go get the potatoes yourself, I’ll stand back here and scream for help if you are attacked by a rogue spud.
Many people think of their grandmother as being the best cook in the world. I don’t have any such illusions. My grandmother was of southern heritage and as such cooked with large amounts of animal fats and had a relatively small repertoire of kitchen creations.
To be sure I had a strong appreciation for some of her work, though. Tops was her banana or pumpkin bread. I don’t know what made it so special to me but I loved it and she knew it. Even as an adult she would make me my own loaf and wrap it within an inch of its life with aluminum foil and recycled bread bags.
Oh, and the bread bags. And plastic containers. A stranger surveying the kitchen may have imagined that grandma was a frugal recycler. And while my grandparents were tight with a buck, the collection of used plastic material was piled so thick on the counters you couldn’t tell from what material the counters were made. It used to irritate me to no end when grandma would wash and dry bread bags, cottage cheese and butter tubs. Sure, have three to five copies of each to store your leftovers, but 11,485 old bread bags was perhaps to the side of excess. Any person who worked up the nerve to suggest to grandma that maybe some of the bags from the 1930s were superfluous got a “Well….” and a stern look that insinuated logic would not prevail.
I also remember the sound of the wood furnace being stoked in the basement. The house was normally very quiet but when the furnace was being tended, the noise telegraphed to nearly every corner. For some reason the sound of ashes being cleared and logs being adjusted was different during the day than at night. I would be dozing nicely in the North Bedroom when someone would be working the furnace and I would feel minor pangs of guilt for not helping out. But I was getting no benefit from the heat so why bother?
Besides, the basement was next to that root cellar, and who knew what those potatoes did in the night!