The Anatomy of My Memories

Do you ever walk down memory lane?  It’s an interesting phrase and one that happens to me almost literally.  While the small plane I was in flew over the city of Denver, I looked out of the window and could see exactly where Jay and I lived for four years.  I could see the streets and parks my friend, Libby, and I jogged through.  I could see the hospital where Jay and I both spent so much time (me as a virologist, he as a med student).  I could see the zoo where I actually bought a season pass to walk around with a very young Seth in a stroller before I realized that just because I was now a stay-at-home mom, I still wasn’t a lover of animals nor of their smells (we should have just bought the day pass).  So many memories came flooding into me merely by seeing the streets where I used to live.

For some reason, nostalgia transported me from Denver to my grandmother’s home in Cache Valley, Utah.  I haven’t been there since I was a very young girl and I found myself running from room to room in my mind.  In the living room, I remember the wide red arm chairs with their scratchy fabric and the L-shaped fireplace that faced both the living room and the family/dining room.  I see my grandmother’s desk with her felt shaped family tree hanging above it and the long couch with a colorful afghan throw on its back.  Straight ahead is the blond dining room table with chairs covered in pink fabric and a decorative needlepoint design, all atop a textured carpet with a variety of oval shaped braided rugs throughout the room I can not only see but feel with my toes perfectly.  The kitchen, in my memory, is wonderfully bright and clean, decorated with pink paint and on the table are colorful metallic cups that feel cold to touch when filled with ice water or cold milk.  The ironing room in a small annex off the kitchen is decorated with bright yellow curtains and a black rotary phone on the wall.  At the back of the kitchen are stairs down to the scary root cellar I always avoided.  My grandmother’s bedroom is off the living rooms near the front door and its contents are fuzzy in spite of me knowing exactly where it is located.  I walk up the stairs that curve ninety degrees at the bottom to the upstairs landing where two twin beds with green bedspreads fill the room.  In one large bedroom to the left, two huge beds with white chenille covers await their guests and another room holds only one bed as well as a mirrored vanity with a painted rock on top which I pretended held my blue eyeshadow and bright red lipstick.  It must be summer because the room is hot and the windowsill contains dead flies.

The house is so clear in my memories.  White, with a horseshoe driveway with tall, tall trees on either side of the pavement. The roof was dark green and so low to the ground back by the kitchen that you could walk up and down it.  Raspberries fill the yard.  An old car with a push start ignition stood in the rickety garage.  The grass is prickly and patchy.

I walk through this house but as hard as I try to remember, I cannot find the bathroom.  There must be a bathroom.  It must be on the main floor somewhere but where?  Off the kitchen?  In the master bedroom? I don’t remember one upstairs.

I ask my mother my first day of visiting and she describes it as off the dining room.  I can’t picture it.  She describes it in detail, the yellow color, the wallpaper, the half wall and none of it rings a bell.  It’s a complete non-memory.

Perhaps I would remember if I saw a picture of it.  I’m sure I used that bathroom.  When I was telling this experience to my younger sister, Sarah, she immediately told me, “If you walked straight ahead from the front door, it was next to the dining room table.  She was even younger than I was.  Of course, she also has a freaky memory, but still...it troubled me.

I decided that I never, ever wanted to walk through the halls of my childhood home and not remember where the bathrooms were.  There is something very powerful about photos in stirring up remembrance and although my parents have made changes and upgrades throughout the house and it is decorated with much fancier things than my  mother dared attempt while we six children bounded through the house, I still delight in mentally wandering from room to room.  So many, many memories in each one.

It’s only a structure but it holds the first half of my life.




Recently updated with new siding, garage doors and a fancy vinyl fence (we had the scary wobbly metal one that was probably scary wobbly because my brother and his friends liked to leap over it), I love the quaintness of this home.  This ugly March doesn’t capture it well at all as the front always has lovely flowers blooming in beds that run along the entire front.  There used to be a pretty crabtree in the middle of the yard and a tall weeping birch to the right whose dangling branches provided exotic doorways to a multi-roomed fort.




The west side.  This was the main play yard.  Here is where we played croquet, volleyball, and did cartwheels.  Jon and I used to practice our backspins on a piece of cardboard placed on the grass.  This little area separated by the small walk is the piece of lawn I used to go and sit on so it would get used.  I worried it would feel...lonely.  The brick fence was a gateway to the roof which we frequently accessed as teenagers to jump down onto the backyard trampoline.  My poor parents.  It’s hard to see but there is a garden along the fence and house and it always produces a lot of vegetables and strawberries each year.  It even looks pretty with yellow and orange marigolds running along its border.



The patio.  An excellent place for basketball (obviously) and sunbathing.  I can remember being oddly obsessed with making the sophomore high school basketball team and practicing my free throws over and over the summer before tryouts.  I distinctly remember my sister, Emily, telling me I was missing a lot of them.  On the grass was where the tent was set up when cousins came to visit and always my preferred sprinkler location if I was ever going to run through it.  I’m standing nearby the backyard raspberry patch that we called the briar patch.  Our cat is buried there.  I didn’t like the cat.




The living room wall.  I love this wall.  For me, it is my mother’s wall.  It’s decorated with her past.  English things for her time in England. Things from both China and Myanmar from her time there. Books from her studies as an English major.  Books from my adolescence.  Copies of scriptures and even an old french textbook so I can remember how to conjugate verbs in the subjunctive tense.    I’m not sure if I have a favorite thing up there.  Maybe the Shakespeare plate that has been up there for as long as I can remember or the girl on the top shelf wearing a blowing pink dress because I would have liked to have been that girl.  Maybe the nativity because it is one of many that she possesses and loves.  No, I see it now.  It is the bell that my grandmother used to call for help on the shelf underneath the mirror.

That mirror is iconic.  It was our audience when we performed.  Our last minute appearance check before heading out anywhere.  I laugh when I remember coming home and seeing dozens of my school pictures decorating it and the other shelves.  Over and over and over again.  My siblings always got a great laugh watching me take them all down in embarrassment when I’d come home.




The kitchen.  My favorite thing by far in this room is the wall oven.  I thought it was so fancy.  Everyone I knew had an oven underneath their range but we had this wall oven that you didn’t have to bend over to open and it was symbolic to me somehow of how my mother did things differently than my friends’ moms.  I wish I could say I have memories of helping my mom with meals and doing lots and lots of dishes but I was pretty spoiled.  Sure, I did the dishes sometimes but the memories of me snacking on homemade bread or frozen Keebler grasshopper cookies are stronger than pulling anything out of that glamorous oven.




The dining room.  Nine of us sat around this table (which is bigger with a few leaves in it) for a big chunk of my childhood.  I sat in the far corner furthest away from the kitchen next to my dad, who sat in the middle of the long side, and my sister, Emily, who had an arm chair next to the sliding glass doors.  Maureen sat next to her and I faced my mother, who sat nearest the kitchen for obvious reasons, and Sarah, who never got a hard chair.  She had a non-matching squishy brown thing that had to be pushed against the wall when we weren’t eating.  My grandmother sat in the chair on the right nearest the living room and my brother sat to her left.  Jennifer finished the nine between Jon and my dad.  My head is full of plastic tablecloths and fancy lace ones that came out for holiday meals and company.  It is illuminated by a glass chandelier that I’ve since learned is quite simple but seemed luxurious to a young girl.  I imagined its dangling shards (that have since been replaced by real waterford crystal) as my earrings (I was a bit big earring obsessed as a youth).  I still love it.




Looking at the living room from the dining room you can see the large windows that are almost always left uncovered.  Many have reported watching us dance or wrestle or just being as they drove past our house at night.  This is the room where we gather.  It holds no TV and the chairs are all different from the ones I remember but the touch lamps are the same and the crack in the ceiling that my mom always worried about when the frequent dancing would begin remains.   More than the things it holds, I cherish  the words, the music and the ideas that have been sung and shared here.  Sadly, no photo will ever be able to capture those.



The upstairs hallway.  Those cupboards contain all the fancy things my mother collected during her travels as a young adult and she waited years and years to bring them out.




In the hallway behind the door to the downstairs is a cork board that holds all kinds of out of date things.  It used to hold the picture buttons of me and my sister Sarah in our sport uniforms made for boosters to wear during our games.  The wall phone with the cord so long and stretched out it touched the floor was mounted next to it.  I love this old phone contact sheet still hanging.   I’m pretty sure that was my sophomore at BYU phone number.




The main bathroom.  I grew up with a pink tub so at some level, having one now is a comfort.  This is the best tub.  Even though none of us used my parents shower, I can’t remember it ever having a rod with a shower curtain to double as a shower.  It was just always...the tub.  Emily permed, colored, rag tied, braided and hot curled my hair in here.  I remember trying to sneak out the window once.  It wasn’t this window, it was one that opened at an angle from the top.  I think I may have been successful but my memory says there was pain involved....




What I consider my Grandma’s room.  Her white leather rocking chair was in the right corner and her bed pushed up against the left wall.  Her TV stood diagonally from her chair and her tall dresser right next to it.  Another chair stood nearby the door.  I loved having her live with us and loved seeing that same felt family tree on the wall above her chair.  It also made me sad because it showed the name of three aunts and an uncle who I had never met.  All had died.  I felt sad for her.

I loved these curtains.  I fancied that when I got married, my mom could make my veil out of one of them.  So funny.  I’m glad they are still on the walls and were never on my head.    I know this room was also Sarah’s room for awhile and a TV room for many years after we had all moved out.  Now, my mom sews and irons in here and my dad practices the accompaniments for the ward choir on the keyboard but it will always be Grandma’s room.




My parent’s room.  If you were lucky and got up early, you could snuggle with my mom in bed and read the paper (never my dad.  I have never once woken up for the day before my dad).  A comfortable chair fills it now but the space underneath the larger window always held a desk with my mom’s sewing machine on it.  I can see fabric on the bed and my mom working on a choir dress or a prom dress or a bridesmaid dress or an easter dress.  I loved those dresses.




The view from their bed.  I just wanted to remember how pretty the mountain looks from here.  And you could see their bathroom which always seemed very private to me.  I hardly ever used it.  I do remember going in there to look through their records which, for some reason, were in a box on the floor underneath the sink.




The stairs.  See that tiny strip of carpet on the left?  Can you picture a young girl using it as her balance beam?  And the walls were just narrow enough to climb up barefoot.  I walked down them several times while I was visiting and I noticed that my descent sounded like my mom’s descent.  I could always tell who was coming downstairs by how they walked down.  I was a little surprised when my own current sound was so familiar.




The closet at the top of the stairs.  The perfect place to hide in a game of hide-and-seek.  Also, the perfect place for a lazy teenage girl to put everything her mother told her to take downstairs thinking she would just “do it later.”  I wonder if I still have something of mine in there that never made it to my room.




The family room.  I wish I had a picture of the orange striped carpet of my young childhood.  This was wear the sleepovers were held and the movie nights and even where I got my first kiss (it was yucky and during the movie Christmas vacation even though it was in August).  Lots of wrestling.  It is completely black when the lights are off because there are no windows.  That’s made for some smoky rooms when a fire gets going.  We rarely had fires down here.




I love these collage frames.  I took pictures so I’d have these pictures too.








When there are five girls and a grandma, the sole boy needs some privacy.  Sadly, privacy came at a premium and the fruit room became Jon’s room.  After awhile, some carpet, wallpaper and ceiling helped make it less...storage like.  Still, my brother slept with the peaches and the pears and the washer and dryer.  He made it his own with posters of Van Halen and other glam rock bands on the wall.  He did have his own door that led directly to the garage.  I don’t know if he used it.  Well...I know he did when we used to sneak out to ride our bikes down to Green Meadow Market on Saturday night for a six pack of Cherry Coke to drink before Saturday Night Live.    I was in fourth grade when I did this.  Fourth grade!!!!!!!




The hallway to the downstairs bedrooms.  I think we all liked to climb up these walls and have people walk through our legs.  I don’t know how my mother kept the walls clean.




This room housed my Barbie mansion.  I loved barbies!  It stood where the bookshelf is now and it was pink and glorious.  I had the convertible too.  And that mirror was a teenage girl’s best friend.  It helped me with many an outfit ensemble.




Jen’s room or Sarah’s room or what I call the green room.  This was my room too for many, many years but I never think of it that way.  For a long time, Sarah and I shared bunk beds and my sister, Jen, had her own twin along the other wall.  This was the room I slept in when I had the worst nightmare of my life after my cousin was murdered and her killers were still on the loose and I was so scared I couldn’t move.  It is also where my final destination was when I had to sneak back to bed after trying to catch Santa on Christmas Eve.  As a young girl, my dad would tuck me us in and then, as he walked back upstairs, we would call out, “Goodnight!  I love you!  What’s for breakfast tomorrow?”  We said it so regularly and predictably I can still hear the rhythm of the chant and our intonations.




Emily and Maureen’s room.  Any girl with older sisters can attest to the tendency to worship them during their teenage years.  I loved their room.  I loved their pink and mint green reversible comforters.  I loved their boy posters on the wall.  It was also my room.  For my entire high school career, this was where I read books until the middle of the night and where wet towel after wet towel stayed on the floor until my mother came to either rehang them or wash them.  I would have slapped me!  FYI, this is the one and only quilt I have ever made.  I wanted it in my parents house so I could always see it.  I think it’s beautiful but it was so hard, I’ve never wanted to try another.



I wanted a view of the other wall.  It was my room after all.




The downstairs bathroom.  Picture five girls all getting ready at the same time.  Picture us all sharing a sink, spitting toothpaste over another’s head and trying to get that space between the toilet and the sink that got you up close to the mirror to put your mascara on.  I took the longest showers as a teen.  At least 20 minutes.  My dad hated it.  Not only did I use up all the hot water but I’m sure I upped the heating bill.




I love this house because it holds many of my favorite memories.  I hope these pictures help me to always remember them.