Two doors lead into the southeast downstairs room in our house.  One is from the hallway and the other is from the library.  Both stand open nowadays, except in the coldest weather.  Those times usually involve an east wind and we try to keep the easternmost part of the house ‘closed off.’

But usually, the doors are propped open –one with an old sadiron and one with a smooth, black river rock that came up as ballast on an oyster schooner long ago.  (Without them, the doors swing shut these days because of the way the house has settled since it was built in 1869.  I guess even a house is entitled to uneven posture at age 143.) We call the room the “East Room” but since it’s usually where we gather in the evenings when we are alone, I think of it as the “Family Room.”

My folks, in their turn, called it “The Victorian Room” because when they refurbished the house in the early 1970s they gave in to their fantasies about what a parlor of the 1890s era might have looked like.  (It never had, of course; this was a simple farmhouse.)  They fitted it out with velvet drapes and a chandelier but, in reality, it was still the Family Room.

For the fifty-plus years my grandparents were in the house, the room was referred to as “The Nursery.”  With its big wood stove, kept stoked night and day by my grandfather, it was where the children slept and played in their pre-school years – truly a nursery in the old-fashioned sense of the word.

So it seems logical that behind one of those open doors is where a large game board ‘lives.’  It measures 28½ inches square, is made of wood and has a different game pattern painted on each side.  It is surrounded by a wooden frame and in each of the four corners is a mesh pocket where a ball might be aimed, as in snookers or pool.  We have absolutely no idea what the games are or who the game board belonged to.

My mother did have some memory of the board, itself, but not of how it was used.  She thought it must have belonged to the “older” children.  She was the youngest of seven, so by the time she came along, that particular game may have been out of fashion.  Perhaps it had been put up in the attic and it was an out-of-sight-out-of-mind sort of thing.

I imagine it was my folks who found it and placed it behind their “Victorian Room” door.  I think my dad would drag it out now and then to ask visitors if they could identify the game.  But, eventually, we all lost sight of it again.  When I do think of it, I’m glad it’s there – a reminder, not only of long-ago, but a clear example of how often we only know part of the story.