I sit on a squishy couch in a dim and darkened room by an ancient upright piano with a stuck middle C, contemplating the eerie light of a bluish antique lamp as I listen to”I Could Have Danced All Night” from My Fair Lady. What a perfect musical! What humor! What charm! I admire the sophisticated catchiness of each rhyme and the evocative music, the colorful, gritty characters. . . . .
Well, I suppose my love for this rags to riches tale of a Cockney flower girl originates in my two year old self singing “Wiv a Liddle Bit of Luck”, and drunkenly running about the house. And in many swaggering performances of “Just Yew Wait ‘enry ‘iggens, Just Yew Wait!”. However, common wisdom holds that shared sentiment endears. If a song embodies your own thoughts, you feel a bond to it, no matter how bad the singer be. “I Could Have Danced All Night” conveys my current feelings perfectly. No – I am not in love with a man – but I am with a house!
At last, we are home. A new home like an antique shop. A home full of fireplaces and fourposters, books and bobbins. It is lit by delicate porcelain lamps. Three winding staircases lead to the upstairs – the Little Ones (my younger sisters) can sneak down to the kitchen through the private staircase leading to their room. Our kitchen is small and bright and full of copper pots. In its center sits a cast- iron stove, pot-bellied and cheerful, ready to heat the house during the bitter winter to come. My dad’s study is hidden in the very core of the house, shelves reaching the ceiling in a plethora of colorful bookcovers. It is very professorish: musty, old, and full of information. It’s as if even the room has a brain, working madly just beneath the floorboards.
Traveling up one of our many staircases, you find the bedrooms. After passing a green-tiled bathroom which may remind you of the ocean, you enter a doorway into a red and white room with a queen bed and large, light windows. The Red Room. It’s mine, and I shove you out of it, because clothes are strewn everywhere and I haven’t organized my stuff. A queen bed! Fancy that. All to myself.
My brother got the Green Room. A fireplace sits empty along one (green) wall, black and lonely but useable. I foresee secret midnight s’mores in the winter at midnight before a raging fire. Along the adjacent wall rests a dignified, (green) settee in the Roman style. Perhaps I will buy B– a (green) hookah, and he can strike a mysterious reclining pose on the settee while smoking like a silent Arabian of the East. He too gets a queen sized with heavy, (green) coverlets.
The Little Ones got the best room. It’s interior decor is cute and quaint with a painting of a good-natured dog on the wall, and special dressers for short people like themselves. It opens into a private bathroom with a old-fashioned bathtub, and, as I previously mentioned, a private staircase. Only one drawback does it hold – no queen beds. Only two twins, plump and short and white.
After going to a Portuguese church service today, we popped into a Whole Foods near Harvard and bought up some edibles. Oh my, looks like it’s time for a segue, friends. Portuguese church service. Ahem. It was in Portuguese, but we got some little devices like those audio tours you can buy at castles and places. We were rather late, but we paraded down the aisle, clittering and clattering as we figured out the audio-devices, and slumped into a pew near the front. I sat there with the bulky mp3 player like thing hooked to my jeans pocket and a pair of headphones perched on my head, listening politely to a translator as a Portuguese man lectured up front in Portuguese. Then we sang hymns in Portuguese. Then we listened to the pastor preach in English, sentence by sentence, as a girl beside him translated his words into Portuguese. Yeah. A lot of Portuguese. It was fun though. And they were friendly, the Portuguese.
Now segue back to the house – simply put, I love it with all its spiderwebs and dust. My mom may tear her hair out at the dirtiness, but I am content – especially seeing as we are located two minutes away from a road of patisseries, cafes, and used bookstore type places. It was love at first sight – I saw the house from the road as we drove up in our van with the U-Haul trailer, and I knew it for my own. Wood, tall, and pink. A lovely, Victorian sort of pink. Proper and dignified and a bit stuffy.
Behind the house, out of sight of the roads that surround us on two sides, flowers a hidden garden with a shade-dappled hammock swinging and a glass table accompanied by delicate chairs. Greenery all around – greenery, greenery, greenery, though I can hear traffic outside the window even now.
Below is the basement – where none dare venture but my dad. My time will come eventually. Above is the attic – hot and full of insulation and storage space. It seems to have a passage to the rooftop, but I have not had time to figure out how to get up there yet.
Keep posted for reports on secret passageways and skeletons in the closets.
Farewell, my friends, farewell.
