What I Would Grab In a Fire

When I was little I used to lay in bed at night and wrestle with the paranoid possibility that the house could catch fire and I'd have to decide what to save. I'd run through all the possibilities - my Barbies? my favorite clothes? my jewelry? my stuffed animals? Would I wake up my parents before or after I grabbed my stuff? Which neighbor's house would we evacuate to? This seriously would keep me going for hours. I was an insomniac at a very early age (I outgrew it).

These days it is easier to figure out what is important. Of course it is those things that can not be replaced. I have way too much clutter in my house, way too many things I could live without but just like having around. But I know, these days, that if my house caught fire and I had to grab just one thing (besides my child and my dog, of course) it would have to be these letters my father wrote when he served in World War II.

Just about all of them are to his mother - he wrote to her several times a week. For the entire time that he served and was away from home, his daily life is chronicled in these letters. His fears for the future, his romantic dilemmas (my mom was not yet really in the picture), his longing for home, anecdotes from around the air base, what movies he saw and what he ate for dinner. They are all handwritten, of course, in his now familiar rambling script. I can imagine him in his barracks hunched over a desk, or propped in his bunk dutifully writing to his mother. His "voice" comes through loud and clear and when I read them I see my father in a completely different way than I, of course, knew him. He is, for those few moments, young, vulnerable, and impressionable. He was envious, curious, and ambitious. He was human.

Dad has been gone for 20 years now and I know, in case of fire, I know that these can NEVER be replaced. I have been trying for years to figure out a good way to preserve them. Nothing brilliant has ever hit me. So they sit in a shoebox on the top shelf of my closet, easy to get to in case I have to.

Christmas Craftiness

I know it's only August but I've got Christmas in the back, the far corners, of my brain. Last year when I got my Christmas issue of Better Homes and Gardens they had these super cute patterns in there for little house ornaments. When I saw them it really reminded me of these little cardboard houses we used to put on our mantle at home when I was growing up. Each house was different and each was a sort of cottage or bungalow design. Some had cellophane at the windows and some did not. Most all had snow on the roof. Most had holes cut into the back so you could put a light inside.

Whenever we decorated the house for Christmas, the mantle was always my favorite part. Of course I loved doing the tree, but my mother was a maniac about the icicles (ONE at a time!!! -- sadly, I do the same thing now) and the mantle was always a safer bet. I couldn't screw it up. First went the long piece of glittery cotton for the snowy ground. Then I'd pull out all the houses and the bottle-brush trees. I could spend hours rearranging the houses to build my perfect little community (I guess it was like SIMS in the 60s...). After the houses were perfect, in went the trees. Big ones, small ones, snowy ones, decorated ones. Through the years they all started to get bunged up looking, but I loved them.

The best part came at the end when the reindeer part came. We had all the reindeer (in lovely white plastic in running poses) and even a Rudolph with his red nose. He went at the front, of course. I lined them up side by side in front of all the houses.

Today, the houses have long since bit the dust but I still have the reindeer (although one has a leg amputated at the knee - probably an unfortunate roof landing...). And this year I've been making the little house ornaments from Better Homes and Gardens except I blew the scale up to make mine mantle sized. Mantle sized isn't very big, maybe seven or eight inches tall. I have bought new bottle-brush trees and I will use my white plastic reindeer. And so this Christmas my mantle will have the same sort of display as the one in my childhood. My first house (pictured here) is sort of sloppy and is a ... spec house... I guess you'd say, but I'll keep working on them! Check back in December and see how they all turned out!