From my sweet mother-in-law I learned that dinner could wait. She taught me by example how to fix the meal ahead of time and leave it on the stove to stay warm while we sat down together in the living room for some drinks and conversation.
On the farm and in my childhood home we ate when dinner was ready. My parents had parties that must have involved alcohol, but before a regular evening meal we never sat down in another room so our mom and dad could have a cocktail or a glass of wine.
Drinking on the farm was reserved for hired men, and my mother and her sister, sleeping in their bed in the room called Siberia, were sometimes woken up on weekend nights by the sounds of the drunken hired man stumbling up the back stairs to his room singing “Barney Google.” My mother had a life-long fear of becoming embarrassingly tipsy and accepted drinks with reluctance.
I have only vague memories of the two rooms at the top of the back stairs. The bedroom on the left we called “Charlie Warren’s room.” He was the hired man of my childhood, and, as far as I know, he neither drank nor sang. It frustrates me that I don’t have a mental image for either his room or the one at the other side of the landing. When I went up the back stairs I was mainly focused on the bookcase in the hallway. The two bedrooms were male territory. The boys and men who slept there over the years were my brother, cousins, uncles, great-grandfather, and the hired men.
Since I’ve found no photographs of this part of the house, I drew a picture of how I remember the upstairs hallway. I imagine this interior looking like a drawing by the artist James Castle, who used sharpened sticks dipped into a mixture of soot and spit to make depictions of his home and family. He drew on whatever surface was handy – an envelope, a piece of cardboard, a scrap of newspaper, the page of a book. His drawings evoke for me not just a rendering of place, but also the feeling of a memory not quite formed – a memory like my own of these half-remembered rooms – a smudgy suggestion of what might have been.
“Upstairs Hallway,”Carol Crump Bryner, pencil and charcoal on flattened cardboard box – after James Castle, 2013
On Wednesday: Berries
Hi Carol, what a unique idea for a drawing. That envelope really gives the feeling of entry ways into “mysterious” rooms off in a hallway. I can only imagine how that bedroom, “Siberia” felt in the winter for your Mom and Aunt. I was surprised to learn that the hired men slept in your house: most hired help here have their own place away from the owner’s main house. However, everyone eats together. I enjoyed reading about your “vague memories!”
I don’t think they always slept in the house. In fact there was a whole separate house for a family who worked on the farm, and I will write a post about that later this summer. And thanks, Netzy, for your always kind words.
What fitting materials for this lovely piece of art. Entry by entry you open a box that contains a memory, sometimes your own and often from a forebear. Like most memories, they are sketches of what was, somewhat indistinct and altered by time and intervening experiences. I like the way that the picture of life on the farm is becoming more dimensional with each new aspect that you share.
What a lovely way to put it. That’s true. The memories are like sketches. Thanks for this very perceptive comment, and hope I can keep adding more dimension to the picture.
Half remembered is true for me as well! Once in awhile, or maybe just once, I stayed in the back bedroom on the right. I remember Grammy giving me a hot water bottle to take with me to warm the bed, and I remember my own romantic images of being a pioneer girl living out a Laura Ingalls Wilder story. It’s funny how memory works, isn’t it? I can remember those two senses so clearly, but for the life of me can’t remember what the room looked like. Plus, I remember the stairs coming up along the outside wall and entering directly into that room, but know now from your picture of the living room that that is a memory that’s just wrong!
My only memory of it is of one of those iron beds and of it being dark in there. Maybe if we put all our memories together we can come up with the room. Kirt says the bed was incredibly comfortable. I remember Charlie Warren’s room as being much lighter and with more stuff in it. It’s almost more fun to try to piece the memories together than to just see a photo.
That farmhouse is so commodious – expansive – full of stories and secrets and the half-remembered. Lovely post with such a solid feel in spite of the vague memories, or because of what you’ve done with them!
Thanks so much, Katy. The house still seems solid to me, even if it’s just in my mind.
Have been meaning to comment about this blog since you started it. I love reading everything you’ve been posting!! The memories just keep flowing back! Especially those Thanksgiving dinners and how we and the Austin Nortons would walk out there….. the food, those cream puffs, playing in the hay barn, jumping off the rafters and landing in hay…… such wonderful times!!!!! So sorry I missed that reunion!!!!!!
Hi Paul! So good to hear from you. I wish you had been to the reunion too. Maybe we should have another one sometime. I always envied you all being able to walk out to the farm. But playing football with all the Norton boys in the afternoon was a rugged business. I tried my best to keep up, but it wasn’t easy. Thanks for reading, and for your comment.
(late to the game here … 🙂 So good to see that post from Paul. (And Mike Foster! Your comments are always so lyrical!)
I hope that you and Patti and Kirt and anyone else who might have known those places, WILL combine your memories .. you could be drawing while people talk (like one of those police artists who render a drawing of the suspect from the witness!!) It would be fun to see what you all could come up with. The only memory I have of even being upstairs in the farmhouse was going up the front stairs .. and mostly my memory is of being on the stairs, not in a room or why it was that I was going up them. I wish I’d explored that place more. I remember the dining room of course, and the kitchen, but boy! That place had so many by-ways and I never went down them. Too little, I guess, or too drawn to the peopled places.
I love the rooms’ names, too. Siberia and (the very practical) Charlie Warren’s Room. Ha! So great. (Makes me remember that “the pink room” at the cottage was, to me, always “Germaine’s Room,” cause that’s where she slept when she was with Ellen or us. Ahh … memories.
And CCB! This drawing on the opened box!!! Evocative is right! You’re amazing.
Love you. Thanks, as always, for this.
xoxoox
Oh that would be fun, wouldn’t it. Maybe one of these days if we have another reunion we can all get together and do that. I remember Germaine. And I love it when rooms have names. It gives the room and the things and people in it so much more character. Thanks, Margy.