Just a Young Singer-'Bouter

I have a very special relationship with wood. I love washing dishes, because I use one wooden spoon often, and it feels fantastic under my fingers. One of my roommates used it once and burnt tomato sauce onto it, and wouldn't listen to me when I said it was fine if it stained. That spoon's got history.

I come from an antiques family--when I go home, I sleep in the same bed my great-grandfather did. Different mattress, though. One of my earliest memories of my paternal grandfather is sitting out in the old pigbarn, which had been converted into a shop, smelling the wood-burning stove and watching him file down old pieces of scrap metal, or sanding a piece of furniture for refinishing.

My home is jam-packed with furniture that my grandparents have stripped, refinished, and given/sold to us. In addition, my parents have run around the Midwest looking for pieces that "match"--100-150 year old oak. If you've seen it, you'll know it. There's no color like it in the entire world.

I suspect it's no coincidence that the apartment I chose when I moved off campus has beautiful thick woodwork, buried under fourteen coats of paint. If I owned this place, I'd move out for a weekend and strip the entire apartment. It's 80 year-old oak under all that white paint, and it's a damn crime. My brother's dresser sits in my room. It creaks, the joints are wobbly, but when the sunlight hits it the grain is miles deep and I could stare into it for hours. The mirror's original, too, with that lovely smoky feel that mirrors get after about fifty years.

My parents ran into a table in an antiques shop while they were waiting for a dinner reservation. The shop, apparently, was a complete pit, but my mom went in, stared at this table, and then moved on. My dad went in after her, stared at the same table, came back out, and they bought it. This is the same table I knead bread on in Cleveland.

Speaking of kneading bread, in my entire grandparents' house full of many, many things (in addition to furniture, they collect model tractors, Aladdin lamps, postcards, marbles, buttons, dolls, china, and clocks, to give you an idea of what their house is like) over which the entire family will begin to quibble the moment they go, the only thing I really care about is my grandmother's breadboard. It's huge, about three feet by three feet, and I'm pretty sure I'm the only grandkid to have ever made bread with her on it. One Christmas we turned out thirty loaves of snitzbread and gave them away to all the family.

Snitzbread, if you're not familiar, is a fruited German bread that's usually made for holidays. It's delicious, but I think the recipe only exists for epic porportions.

In my room at home there is also a desk. The desk is the catalyst for the Furniture Wars in my family. One year for my birthday, we went shopping all over Ohio for a nice oak desk for my room. We only found this one that was reasonably priced and small enough to fit up our stairwell. I hated it on sight. But we bought it and brought it home, and once it was up in my room, I fell completely in love. It had drawers and hidey-holes and an ink stain from maybe eighty years ago in Pennsylvania where someone had overturned an ink bottle. It had lovely original hardware and pretty curved legs and folded out to a perfect size to spread out and do work.

Now, the problem is that my parents love this desk just as much as I do, and they insist that it was just bought for me around my birthday, and thus belongs to them. I of course maintain that it was a birthday present, and as such is mine to take with me when I move into a more permanent dwelling. Since the advent of the table, however, a whole new campaign in the Furniture Wars has been launched: the Trade.

"The desk is mine," I say, "but I'll trade it to you for the table. I love that table."
"It is a nice table, isn't it?" says my mom.
"Too bad the desk isn't yours," says Dad.

Then I start offering to take their wardrobe off their hands (ash, perfect for children reading C. S. Lewis,) or perhaps loading up the kitchen table in the middle of the night. They always offer me the secretary or the sideboard. I remind them that I don't want the sideboard or the secretary, and say that my brother's wife can have them someday. Mom always points out that the piano is mine, which it is--her parents bought it for her when she started taking lessons, and it will mean a lot to someday have it in my house for my kids to bang out "heart and soul" until I kill them and go to jail.

I will have a very, very hard time helping them move out of that house someday. It's a fantastic house, and we've remodeled it a couple of times, so it's completely ours. I picked the paint colors that everyone raves about. Mom and I went back and forth on the kitchen cupboards, whether it was smart to put hardwood in the kitchen, with all the foot traffic. We lived in it when the stove was in the TV room and you had to walk a plank to get into the house, looking down into the basement on either side.

I remember when the kitchen was just getting finished up and my grandparents came over to visit. Mom and I had agonized over the placement of the island--if it should be at ninety degrees to the rest of the room, or at more of an angle. We decided on the angle, and my grandfather walked in and said "You're not going to leave it that way, are you?"

We left it that way.

I joke about Jake (the brother) having to move back in there someday, but there's truth to it. I'd hate to ever see another family, someone I didn't know, living in those rooms, touching that stair rail, trying to touch those ceilings. Kate, a high-school friend, once told me that she'd buy it from my parents and live there someday with her kids, and that'd be second-best. She loves our house, and it'd be the perfect place for her future family.

I remember telling Mom over and over that the darker blue was right for the kitchen. She didn't think so. I won, but she disagreed with me so much that she was nearly sick when the paint started going up.

Now, of course, she loves it and wouldn't change it.

My grandmother said she wouldn't marry a farmer.
My mother didn't want anything to do with "that old stuff" when she furnished her new home.
I said that my home didn't mean anything to me, that I would leave it behind almost effortlessly when I came to school.

Now, of course, we love it and wouldn't change it.