My Parents' House is a Museum of My Childhood

A memoir told through furniture

Photo by Morgan Von Gunten on Unsplash

I'm sitting in the upstairs family room of my parents’ house. The room looks like a furniture store.

The inventory includes a large glass display case filled with piano rolls and my maternal grandfather's player piano in the room on which to play them. The piano looks small compared to my memories of it. I can almost see my grandfather perched on the bench, a beer sitting on coaster on the back of the piano, his foot, encased in his corduroy slippers, pumping the pedals. I would sometimes sit next to him, something hard to believe now, looking at the size of the bench. How did we both fit on it? He smelled like beer, cigars, and Lava soap. I would give anything for a chance to press up against his side one more time.

There are also two leather recliner chairs, two love seats, my grandmother's wood cabinet (which held, I think, once held the piano rolls), and a wicker peacock chair that always reminds me of Morticia Addams from the old, 1960s television series.

A large flat-screen television, set on an even larger entertainment console is the focal point of the room. My parents bought the console years ago before flat screens even existed, and the newer television is too wide for the space, so it sits slightly outside the hole. It's an elegant piece, all dark wood, with lovely display shelves surrounding the space where the television is supposed to sit. Instead of artifacts and leather-bound books, there are DVDs and VHS tapes, with brightly colored boxes that are faded and ripped on the shelves.

There are two large speakers that stand over three feet tall on top of which are the brass lamps that have been around since my childhood.

There's a side table that holds a beautiful antique, jade-colored lamp with gold dots and stripes on it. I think the lamp may have come from my paternal grandmother’s house after she died.

From the switch on the lamp, hangs my dad's college graduation tassel. It is faded gold and “69”, the year of both my father’s graduation from college (a first in his family!) and the year of my birth hangs from the tassel.

In the center of the room is a side table, one of a pair, that I remember from my childhood. One of the first pieces of furniture my parents owned as newlyweds. It is made of heavy, black wood with sharp corners, on which a few of my siblings and I have gashed our heads against in our childhood. Carved around the edge of the table is a curving line design which, when I was home sick from school and very bored, I would trace with my small, childish fingers. Cracker crumbs would get stuck in the grooves.

Perhaps this isn't a furniture store but rather a museum of my parents’ life and my childhood. It feels as though each piece should have a placard telling its story.  

Though I've never lived in this house-it is, in fact, 2447 miles away from where my family’s story began-it still has an element of the feeling of homecoming because so much of its contents tell the story of my history.

I could spend weeks in this house, furiously scribbling the stories attached to each item. If I sit in the room long enough, the pieces begin to speak to me. They whisper about their origins, how they came to live in this family room in San Clemente, so far from Cleveland, where we all began. They tell me who they belonged to and what they saw in living rooms far away from here in both time and space.

These lamps and pieces of furniture are the witnesses to my existence.  I cock my head and listen deeply, writing as quickly as I can as I take their dictation. Someday, I think, I will write a book about what they tell me but, for now, I sit quietly and just listen, watching the ghosts of long lost relatives and the imprints of my childhood sit together on the piano bench and play my favorite songs.

---

Inspired to Read

While I wrote today’s essay, I was thinking about the book, Accordion Crimes by E. Annie Proulx. Did you ever read it? They story follows the life of an accordion from owner to owner and tells their stories.

Echo by Pam Munoz Is a beautiful, middle grade, historical novel about a harmonica that ties together the lives three young people. My daughter and I both read it when she was young and cried buckets.

And then there’s the film, The Red Violin, which tells the story of a mysterious violin as it touches the lives of its owners across three centuries.