- Beginnings
Our house was built of redwood lumber than came up from California as ballast on the oyster schooners. The year was 1869. It was built facing the bay with four rooms downstairs and five, including a bathroom (unplumbed, of course) upstairs.
As you enter the house from the broad east porch, you come into a small hall, most of which is taken up with a rather steep stairway that curves toward the top. On the right is a large room that was once the parlor. To the left is a slightly smaller room which may have been a family living room – not kept ‘for best’ as the parlor was.
When my grandparents (“Mama” and “Papa”) moved into the house in 1902, they retained the parlor but converted the erstwhile living room to a nursery. They had two young children, ages three and eighteen months and were expecting a third – and still later, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, and a seventh.
The nursery was where the children slept until they were school age – and Mama, too, when she had a nursing infant. It became their play room; it was where Mama tended them when they were sick; it was where Papa spent several years of his prime in a hospital bed suffering from acute asthma.
The room was kept cozy by a well-stoked, pot-bellied stove and when the youngsters ‘graduated’ to sleeping upstairs they still hustled downstairs with their arms full of clothes on winter mornings to dress in front of its warmth. “That’s how Edwin burned his stomach,” my Aunt Mona would always say at this point in the story.
Throughout my grandparents’ long lives, the room was referred to as ‘The Nursery,’ though in the years after the children were grown and gone, it served more as a sitting room – a family room we might have called it now. When my folks moved into the house, (during a time I still think of as my mother’s ‘Delusions of Grandeur Period’) it was the room that they transformed completely, right down to velvet drapes and a chandelier. They called it the “Victorian Room.”
Not being the elegant type, Nyel and I scaled it back considerably when we moved in. We usually call it “The East Room” which may be descriptive but is inordinately dull. This week, though, we have converted the table that sits in the east-facing bay windows into a little greenhouse – a nursery you might say! But this time it’s for plants, not for children. I’m hoping we can begin calling the room by its rightful name again. “The Nursery” seems so much more fitting than “The East Room.”
That room is so charming, Sydney, I believe I would be always there with a fire in the fireplace!