Our closet under a stairway is large enough for a sleeping cot. It reminds me of the famous literary Harry Potter's bedroom, so I call it the Harry Potter closet. It has two doors. One where I keep the card table, vacuum cleaner and other paraphernalia. The other door opens to an area where a wire shelving rack on wheels holds canned goods and other items too numerous to store in the kitchen pantry.
The spare bedroom is called, Esther's room even though she hasn't visited for some time. We toss things on the bed like cold weather jackets because its easier than hanging them in the closet. Besides, we many need them tomorrow. The bedroom floor is littered with boxes. One with books intended for the VA hospital that have been weeded from those purchased at library sales. There is a box of knitting yarn that I will need later as my knitting progresses. Esther will have to give me a day's notice when she plans to visit, so I can clear out all the junk and make her room attractive again.
Continuing the use of these descriptive names became a habit and I never thought much about it until an acquaintance made the remark that she had never heard of people naming rooms. People do name rooms and areas, but use the descriptive words like 'dining room', 'front room', 'guest bedroom', 'back porch', 'entrance hall', 'rose garden', 'corn field', 'cow pasture'.
Besides rooms, people name houses. Theodore Roosevelt's Sagamore Hill, Tara of Gone With the Wind, Jefferson's Monticello, General Lee's Arlington House to name several. I never lived in a 'named' house, although we did call one house that we lived in for many years by the street name, Hillcrest. The house actually was located at the top of one of the California foot hills with that street name.
The family still uses the address number, 460, to refer to a much loved house that we once lived in. Our using just the number when referring to a particular house puts us in a select category. The following famous address numbers are universally understood; 1600 Pennsylvania (White House), 221b Baker St. (Sherlock Homes), Number 10 Downing Street (home of the British Prime Minister).
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| Sagamore Hill |
1 comment:
We often refer to our homes or previous places we've lived by the name of the city. Sometimes it's because over the fog of time, we've forgotten the exact address but the city name retrieves many memories of the local along with the home: Hollister House, Monterey Condo.
Sometimes, we have more than one name for the same location. The Farm is the same location as Hollister House but at a different period of time when we had a larger than large garden in the backyard.
Sometimes, we just call it by the type of home, which is enough to trigger the memory of it: The Condo, The Beach House.
And sometimes, we didn't give a name to the location. Either the home was too generic to hang a nickname on or for some internal reason, the attachment to the location was not strong enough to warrant one.
The fondest memories are of those places that did get names, and those memories are renewed every time we say it. The memories may fade a bit but the good feelings that are recalled never abate.
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