scintilla day, ummmm.. okay, it’s still #4

Because the weekend prompts (one of which I did not do) were apparently just extras and now we’re back to day four. Oh, well, Day Four it is! And thank you for all the great comments — of course now I’m all behind in replies and noting myself, since I’m actually making an effort to write daily. But I have really been enjoying doing it. After I quit whining every day about how I don’t waaaaaaaaaaaant to do it and I think I’ll just skip it. It’s been really interesting. I’m officially posting them on Tumblr, but I actually get comments here. Which is, of course, quite gratifying. 

Onward. 

Day Four of the Scintilla Project!

Scintilla Day Four: Talk about your childhood bedroom

My childhood bedroom was very small – 8 x 12 feet. It had two windows that met in one corner. A window in each outer wall would have made more sense, but my dad built the house when he and my mom got married, and there were quite a few things that didn’t make sense. It is an interesting and kind of quirky little house, but it does have its peculiarities. A big forsythia bush grew right outside the window on the right.  The gravel-covered driveway went past my windows, so I always heard everyone come and go.

I had my own bedroom since my only sibling is my brother. I was a little jealous of my brother’s bedroom, though. It was bigger than mine, and it had a really cool walk-in closet. I remember being able to walk through his closet and come out in the kitchen, but at some point the refrigerator got moved in front of that door. Now it seems so strange I wonder if I dreamed that, but again — it is an odd little house. My dad was also going to make stairs down to the basement from my brother’s walk in closet, but that was one of the many projects that never materialized. You still have to go outside and walk around the house to get to the basement.

My brother also had bunkbeds. I yearned for bunkbeds. I had a teeny little twin bed with a canopy. The canopy was fun and it made the bed seem kind of secluded, but it wasn’t bunkbeds. I’d often spend the night in my brother’s room and make him let me sleep on the top bunk. And there was that one summer when I was 9 or 10 and bees invaded my walls. You could hear them buzzing in there, and they would come in through mysterious gaps and buzz around the room. My dad tried to get rid of them with poison spray, so dead bees were all over the floor and the shelves and the windowsill. They were either honey bees or yellow jackets.  I had to move in with my brother and got to sleep on the top bunk for what seems like months now. It was probably more like weeks. My dad finally succeeded in evicting the bees at last, and I got my room back.

The most galling inequity of all was when my brother painted his room bright yellow. I begged and begged to paint mine purple, but I had wood paneling, and my parents insisted that it could not be painted. They continued to insist that until I finally moved out and surrendered my room for good. Then my mom moved in and painted the paneling rose. I have never recovered.

The first bedspread I remember was pink, which is kind of funny since I was never a little pink princess kind of girl. I hated dresses, hated shoes, and my favorite attire was jeans and tee-shirts and dirt. But I had a pink frilly bedspread and a pink frilly canopy on my teeny little twin bed and a fluffy little white throw rug on the cold beige and white speckled tile floor until I was 13 or 14. I still remember vividly the huge excitement when my mom decided it was time to update my room’s décor. I got to pick out a new bedspread and canopy and curtains, and best of all, new carpet. That was especially exciting since my room was the coldest one in the house, and that beige and white speckled tile was like hopping across ice cubes in the winter.  In lieu of purple walls, I picked apple green carpet. I still remember lying on the carpet in a state of utter bliss. All the pink stuff was ditched and I got a brown and blue faux-patchwork bedspread and canopy and curtains. Which was there until I left home. Our family was never prone to redecorating with wild abandon.  My brother’s old room is still bright yellow.

Despite my jealously of my brother’s room, my room was still my favorite place. My favorite refuge. Even as a child I preferred my own company to just about everyone else’s, and I spent a lot of time hanging out in my room. This was long before the internet arrived, and we only had one TV so there was no such thing as TV in the bedrooms. I would have LOVED a TV in the bedroom, but it really would not have been very useful since we only got three channels anyhow. As much as I adored television, there’s only so much you can watch on three channels. I did have a cool old radio made of brown plastic, and a cheap stereo that I played loudly and often. And I had millions and millions of books. I also had a whole stable of plastic horses, and several farmyards worth of little plastic farm animals, and a bunch of stuffed animals as well. So I spent most of my time reading, drawing, writing stories that I never finished, and staging elaborate dramas with the little farm animals, plastic horses and stuffed animals. Who all had names and distinct personalities.

My dad still lives in our house, but my former room is unoccupied now. My mom moved into it when I left home for good (and yes, I was a little perturbed. It was my room!!). She passed away nearly three years ago, and now it’s just a storage room for the things he hasn’t been able to get rid of. I’ve thought about sleeping in there sometimes when I visit, but it’s way too full of ghosts. And possibly bees.