Parkhouse ii

You can't see it, but believe me, it's still there.

Now, let's step into the livingroom, shall we? Every couple of years we move all the furniature around, but the bookshelves in the corner have always been the same. They're to your right, between the two windows. They also happen to be directly above where my bed used to be in the basement, and sometimes when I couldn't sleep at night I would fantasize that the big one would finally hit and send those bookshelves through the floor/ceiling and onto my head. They're too small for all the books we have, so we've had to pile a couple hundred in front of them. I haven't read them all, but maybe I will before I die. In the meantime they make me look smart.

On top of the shelves sits a wrought iron sculpture of a tree that my dad made. Beside it is a picture of my grandmother in a flowery porcelain frame that oozes sentimentality. Beside that, a ceramic vase that looks like a wifebeater and is filled with wooden tulips. On top of the other bookshelf is an antique wooden clock. I used to like watching my mother open up the glass door on the front to wind it. We lost the key a long time ago.

Over the years we have accumulated a lot of chairs, most in some form of disrepair, becuase we brought them home for mom to reupholster. I count six right now, in addition to the couch, which also needs to be reupholstered. The window is full of ornamental glass balls. A long time ago we ran out of room on the biggest Christmas tree we could fit in the room, so we hung the extras in the windows. We never bothered to take them down because we liked them. Then we started to buy special balls just for the windows.

I have too many stories to tell about this room, so we will move on.

Turn right, into the hall. The first door is to the office, mom's desk on the left, dad's on the right. The closet is full of old dance costumes and sheets that the cats love to sleep in. It used to be my room, so the walls are a lavender purple that I picked out when I was six. We ran out of paint part way though though, so one wall is decidedly more pink than the others. When I moved out of that room I took the carpet with me and what is left is ugly brown battleship linoleum.

The next door is the bathroom. When we first moved in, my parents had a fight over whether or not it had a window. It did, of course, from the outside of the house, but the people who had lived here before us had covered over it from the inside. Dad soon fixed that. There was a lock on the door that was only ever used once, the time when I locked myself into the bathroom and then couldn't get out for what felt like hours. It was probably only about 20 minutes.

The last door in the hall is my parents' bedroom. I used to go in there to watch TV when I wasn't allowed because it was easier to hear the car coming up the driveway from there than from the livingroom. I also used to jump on their waterbed.

Now, turn around and look down, to your right. Underneath that chest of drawers filled with art supplies is the furnace intake vent where I innocently shoved my invisible friends one day when I was six. I never saw them again.

Tomorrow I do the kitchen.