Almost fifteen years ago our adult son moved back in with us while he went back to school. He stayed for seven years.
Living in a multi-generational household wasn’t easy, but we managed. It took humor, patience, and love. But when the humor ran dry, the patience wore thin, and the love felt tempered by irritation, it helped to have a room to go to and a door to slam.
I thought often about my ancestors during that time and fortified myself with the knowledge that if they could do it, so could I. There were almost always several generations living under the roof of the Hall farmhouse. Aaron built with this kind of living in mind. There were enough rooms to go around, and definitely enough doors to slam. The living room alone had nine doors, although until the 1930’s the one big room of my childhood had been divided into three smaller chambers.
Over the next few months I’ll take you on a tour of the house – a room here and a room there. I’ll begin with the room where my parents started their life together – the upstairs front bedroom.
My mother, Janet Hall, and my father, Charles Grantham Crump married in 1943. It made sense for them to move into the farmhouse with my grandparents while my father did his Coast Guard service during the war. It would be over two years before they had the time or the money to build their own house. In the photo below, my mother sits at her vanity table in the light-filled bedroom at the upstairs front of the farmhouse.
Janet Hall Crump, around 1942
After my birth in the middle of the winter of 1945, my parents brought me home from the hospital to this room. Surely it was cold there even with the clanking and hissing radiators doing their best work. There were no bathrooms on the second floor, just chamber pots under the beds for nighttime use. The switch for the upstairs hall light was at the bottom of the stairs, so an upstairs sleeper needed candles, or flashlights, or someone to turn the switch for them when they reached the top. Later, when I was older and spent occasional nights at the farm, it was my grandmother who did this for me, waiting until I got to the bedroom door and told her goodnight before she pushed the round black button that started the darkness.
It was in this same room in October 1969 that my husband and I, on an overnight visit to my grandmother, stayed awake long into the night in the big lumpy bed with the chamber pot underneath, trying to decide whether or not to go to Alaska. In a way, this was the start of our life together, because we decided to go north to build our own rooms and doors.
“Studio Door,” Carol Crump Bryner, oil on panel, 2001
On Wednesday: Ginger Cookies
I look forward to the house tour. It sounds like the generations, and their ways, did overlap in the Hall house more than many. Your sense of your history and and appreciation of your roots were built little by little (and door by door) through all the interactions with your elders and experiences with relics from earlier times. A richly woven tapestry.
Thanks Mike. I feel lucky to have been able to see and remember these rooms and hear about the people who lived in them. I’m having fun trying to recreate them.
Love this piece Carol. So evocative. Makes me want to write about rooms and doors. And to think that in your lifetime people were still without electricity and indoor plumbing in upstairs rooms. Amazing.
Hi Carol! Thank you. There was electricity upstairs, but the wiring as such didn’t let you turn off the hall lights from the upstairs hallway. So I had to go into the room I was sleeping in, pull the string above the bed so there would be light, and then tell my grandmother that it was ok to turn off the lights in the hall. But no plumbing upstairs. Just the one bathroom downstairs.
How clever of you to combine doors, rooms and people making big decisions. Slam the door in frustration or close gently to provide privacy and space to talk. Nicely done, Carol. The photo of your mom is lovely and who would have known it would become a period piece, a slice of life from another era. It’s great that you have so many momentos and personal documents of the past, but the best part is how well you integrate your own comments and colorful paintings to offer a slightly different and contemporary point-of-view.
Your comments are always so meaningful and right on for me. Thank you so much! I hadn’t thought about the doors and making big decisions bit, but it is very true. Always good to hear from you Judy.
I love Judy Rosen’s comment – she’s exactly right about the integrating you do. I always wonder, and this is being literal, was door slamming really OK? Or are you using that metaphorically. In my temperamental English/Irish family, it was forbidden (a hardship), so I always have a hard time picturing it being OK with your so much more contained ancestors. Probably you are speaking metaphorically. I like the concept of pushing the button to “start the darkness.” And Janet looks so happy and beautiful in that photo.
(I thought I was writing the following reply to you, but guess I pushed wrong button.)
Oh, it’s so interesting that you mentioned the door slamming, because I had exactly that thought when writing this. Did those Halls slam the doors? I have no idea, and I doubt it. But I have slammed many a door in my time, and I might have gotten that from my dad who had a temper like mine and liked to emphasize his mood by doing something that let everyone know he was mad without actually having to say anything about it. Usually it involved pounding his fist down onto the kitchen table. But I preferred that to pouting – something that I was also guilty of, -and a trait that I think came from the Halls through my mother. A good pout could last for days, but the door slam was over quickly.
Carol – I love this story, the photo of your mother and your painting! When having discussions – while lying in lumpy beds or elsewhere – it’s always so hard to imagine the absolute shift of trajectory that may happen with a decision, such as heading north. Love thinking about it and all the lives we could and do lead.
Thanks so much Katie. Yes, sometimes our decisions lead to nothing, but other times they can be so momentous and so very memorable.