When I was two and a half years old we moved into a new house. Norwood Avenue would belong to someone else with its pear tree in the yard that fed us succulent fruit and its porch swing that rocked me to sleep in the cradle of my mother’s arms and voice singing “you are my sunshine.” The moving men came in their large truck. The men lumbered like rhinos, their tanned skin taut across their bodies – it looked as though it would tear if they strained too much lifting our furniture. I thought they were stealing my belongings. My clown lamp with balloons for light bulbs in red, blue, yellow and green and my rocking chair with purple flowers parenthetically around my name on the dark wood. They loaded my crib into the rumbling and angry truck as it chugged down the street I sank inside with loss. My identity was in my bedroom, the room that now was only four empty walls with a crumpled piece of paper in one corner and dust in the other. I clung to my Nana’s shoulder – her soft paper-thin skin comforted my cheek and her arm wrapped around me like a seat belt.
My mother and her mother took the car to the new house. On the street with trees like a forest top, reaching together and creating a canopy, a harbor of home. When I get on my first bus ride to school, coming down the street and seeing the safety of the trees ahead, it feels more like home than my clown lamp did when I was two. The pair raced home before Nana and I and even the movers, they all set my room together like it was on Norwood. When I walked into the bedroom it looked just like my room but instead of one window I had two and my rocking chair was next to the closet. I found a magical door in the wall and there was a radiator emanating heat in winter. I had a lamp on the ceiling.
When I was six I thought the magical door could never be opened, it was sealed shut. I thought if it ever could be opened it would lead to a magical world outside my bedroom. That year my father opened it and the excitement ate my vocal chords while I stood there anticipating the other side. He cut the seal with a knife and used a crow bar to pry the door off. There were no hinges, only a wooden plank. He opened the door because the bathtub had stopped working. I didn’t understand how the magic door could help until I saw, there was no world inside the door. There were no magical people or new friends. There were pipes and dripping water. Disappointed and angry at my father for showing me reality, I began to loathe my room. It once was a mystical place and turned into a harsh cold room with pipes and bright lamps just like every other room.
I turned fourteen and decided to give my room a second chance. I reclaimed the mystery for myself. Instead of having a stark white ceiling and pink walls I wanted colors and statements. Dad refused to allow me to paint on the walls. Instead I plastered magazine clippings to the ceiling around the bright lamp in the center. It took weeks to find clippings worthy of my bedroom. I stood on my bed and moved it steadily throughout the room to give me height.
Before we moved into the house the people who lived there were named the Claytons. There is a toyshop in Williamsville, the village next to the town where my house is in. I don’t think they owned it though. The girl who lived in my room was the oldest just like me and she had Scarlet O’Hara wallpaper on her walls. It wasn’t on the walls when I moved in, the wallpaper when I moved in was flowery with blue and brown and pink flowers on a white background. I know she had Scarlet O’Hara wallpaper because her brother came to see the house when he was in Buffalo one winter. He walked around the house telling us stories about when they lived there, like they used to play elevator in the pantry under the stairs that we use to store pots and pans that we don’t use every day. He also told us about the wallpaper in my bedroom and showed us how there is some in the wood ceiling of the attic. On our attic door are flowers painted in neon green and yellow and orange. It says “attics are fun” and the man said that his family didn’t put that there, but that it was there when they moved in. We liked it and so we kept it too. Ever since that time he writes us a Christmas card updating us on his family and their lives and tells us he misses the house and neighborhood. Other people’s houses are not gross like that woman from the Real Housewives of New Jersey says they are, they are in fact rich with history and stories similar to our own and give us glimpses into the house’s life before us. I love living in someone else’s house, it becomes our own home and is my house but still has the life of another family inside it.
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