Plaster Memories.

I want to write about the light in the room today, how it is a dusty, soft, white light coming through the faded, paper-thin 1960's curtains. My gramma made these curtains, and they used to hang in my mom's room when she was a teenager. We had them in our house growing up, too. In one place we lived, they were hanging in the spare bedroom where my sister slept when she was delirious with pneumonia. She always remembers seeing dad's face in the floral pattern of the curtains, and can't stand to look at the curtains now because they remind her of being so sick. That brain memory happens sometimes, like the way I would see the little worm wearing a hat on the paneled ceilings of different trailers we lived in. Always, I could lay down, look up, and see that friendly little worm.

The house my husband and I are in now has old lath and plaster walls, covered in a texture, too much texture. When we were using the bedroom off the kitchen, my husband slept next to the wall and once found the shape of a boot, right in his line of vision. From then on, his eyes always fell on the boot. He would sometimes mutter about how he couldn't stop staring at the boot.

Our ceilings and a wall are being re-done right now, because of water damage due to ice-dams this winter. As I type, there is a contractor taping and mudding in my kitchen below me. When they took down the ceilings, they found tons of old empty players cigarette packages. Who put those there, and why? I often wonder about the other people who spent the past eighty years in this house. Who were they? I always felt like we kind of rescued this house, as it was in disrepair when we first got it. So many layers of paint cover everything. I get curious when the paint chips to reveal dark, hardwood original baseboards or five panel doors.

For some reason I like to keep as many traces of the original house around as possible. It's like with the curtains, I wish they wouldn't fade, I wish the sun wouldn't do what it always does. I wonder if whoever lived in this house in 1942 could walk through now, and still find their way around, still recognize pieces of the house that their brain has committed to memory. In reality, without continued work, houses fall apart, and when we move on, who knows what will come of this one. The curtains are pretty much useless at keeping light out now, and they don't match my bedding, so I am planning on sewing some new ones soon. These material things come and go. Rust and moths. I can't latch onto them.