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Generations House
by Janet Moyers Bowmer

My world as a child was "the neighborhood", an area of two to three square blocks that, with permission, included crossing Park Avenue to the Library. Now that was a Library: a solid brick edifice with lamp-post sentinels at the foot of well-worn steps and tall, arched windows that flooded the Children's Room with light. My life long goal (at the age of ten) to gain entrance to that inner sanctum of learning, "The Adult Reading Room" was thwarted by the razing of Mr. Carnegie's temple to the temporal and the construction of a building more suited to commerce than contemplation, its design immediately copied downtown as a bank and its echoing fountain masking the sound of leaks in its cement and glass exterior. I mourn that building yet.

Outside, across College Place there was Library Park, where Nana would take us for a peanut-butter picnic in the high ceilinged shade of the tall trees and a game of tag around the hedges on a hot afternoon and a cold drink from the fountain at the corner before heading home. Home was a big old house that seemed to stretch to take in three and sometimes four generations at a time. A rainbow of petunias filled the strip between the picket fence and gravel drive, while the fence top played trellis to a trinity of roses: small pink climbers that looked almost like carnations, limpid orange-edged yellow tea roses, and a deep red, unruly variety that could never decide which side of the fence was home.

Inside the gate along the fence were tall purple irises and two blue hydrangeas, interspersed with the begonias exiled from the dining room each spring. The round bed in the center of the yard, brick-edged and brimming with lilies of the valley and tall, graceful hyacinths (wood hyacinths, not these fat, squat things they sell you now) were fed with coffee grounds and washed egg shells, Grandma's plant foods of choice years before the word "organic" entered our vocabulary. Every day at noon the bells of all the churches would ring out in turn (and may still do, unheard above the noise of traffic) their sound blowing in past the kitchen curtains on the warm, flower-scented air of summer. The front porch, screened and awninged, became a second living room of sorts where stationed silently on cushioned rattan settee, chair or rocker you could watch the world pass by unseen. On sticky summer nights when the heat and humidity of the second floor bedrooms was smothering, my father would stretch out on the chaise lounge until the air cooled down. Most of the downstairs rooms, with horse-hair plaster walls and ceilings twelve feet high, and sheers and drapes drawn shut, retained the pleasant air of night and let it settle around our feet.

All these memories come washing over me as I take the mirror down from over the mantle where my grandfather hung it 53 years ago. I'll hang it now in Mom's room, in a new four generation house. About the author:
I'm a mother and grandmother. This is about emptying the old home place and moving my mom in with us (my husband, kids, grand-daughter and nephew) a few years ago.