Peeling Back Layers

I hope you have a wonderful Poetry Friday!  Please visit Mary Lee at A(nother) Year of Reading for this week's roundup.  She (and all of the Inklings) have secrets to share with us!

A few weeks ago, Molly Hogan commented on my "Monopoly" post that she found a Monopoly token between the floorboards of her old house.  I thought that had amazing potential for a story, and it got me thinking … we, too, live in a house that wasn’t built in this century.  This old house was built in the 1880’s.  Old houses have seen so much through the decades: secrets, laughter, heartbreak.  So much has happened within these walls, and I only know my slice of time, not what comes before or what will come after.

It seems that wallpaper is one tiny scrap of history that gives us an idea what life might have been like in another time.  When we first moved in, we stripped layers and layers of wallpaper in this house.  Some were pretty (and some were pretty ugly), but someone loved them enough to cover an entire room with them.  I saved scraps as we peeled away layers of history, and I thought it might be fun to pull them out and look at them now that we have lived in this house for a couple of decades.

So, as you can see, this house had a lot to say about the people who lived here, and the “clothes” that it wore on its walls over the years.

I found this poem that seemed apropos:

Old Houses
By Robert Cording

Year after year after year
I have come to love slowly

how old houses hold themselves—

before November’s drizzled rain
or the refreshing light of June—

as if they have all come to agree
that, in time, the days are no longer
a matter of suffering or rejoicing.

You may read the rest here if you like!

Thank you for touring our house’s wallpaper history with me!