WRITING ON THE WALL

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

When we started removing the wallpaper, I was surprised to see the markings the previous owners had made on the bare sheetrock beneath. When we’d moved into the house, the owners had put those square mirrors across one wall in the living room. One was butted against another until the design almost meshed, but not quite. You remember the kind, right? The mirror tiles had a splash of gold color through them. The idea was to make the room appear larger. I’m sure in the 1970s when the house was built, this seemed truly sophisticated. By the time we moved in, the look had traveled past Style Avenue and ended in the gutter of a Dead End.

We’d taken down the glass tiles and decided a nice, quiet white textured wallpaper was a more hip look. It’s been so long, I’d forgotten about those mirror tiles and the carefully marked grids. The penciled squares wobbled a bit here and there, but when the collage had been finished, it was impossible to notice. I always felt like we lived in a hippie’s dance studio. Where were the wooden bead curtains and the strobe light? Maybe the owners took those with them when they moved out.

Years later we hosted a backyard barbecue where my brother’s date’s mouth stayed open for the first five minutes she was here. Finally, she said, “This is the house I grew up in. Only it didn’t look like this.”

We had changed just about everything we could, including ripping off tons of wallpaper – it was in every room and every wall except for the one with the glass mirror tiles. Almost of it bright yellow, again apparently a popular choice during the Seventies.

I can only imagine what my brother’s date thought when she entered a house she thought she knew, only to find walls were knocked out or moved a few feet one way or another. When she married my brother a few years later, we met her parents. We’d already met once before when we signed the mortgage papers at the title company. When my new sister-in-law introduced us to her parents and told them we’d bought their old home, the mother turned to me and asked, “Did you leave the house like we had it?”

“We did for a long time,” I said, which seemed to make her happy and made my husband smile. Later he told me he thought that was the best answer to give, but he wasn’t sure that was what I was going to say. The improvements we made were done over decades. Some lasted longer than others when a chosen decorating color went out of fashion and our tastes had undergone their own evolution into what I hope is more sophisticated. I have to admit that surely the previous homeowners had thought their choices were improvements, so maybe in retrospect, ours won’t look like improvements to future owners.

Seeing the pencil grids on the walls made me wonder about other houses we’d owned. Our first home was a small three bedroom house built in 1945. I remember before we put new paneling on our son’s walls, we let the kids draw on the walls. It was harmless and would be covered and I never thought about anyone removing the paneling someday down the road. The kids were having a blast and before I knew it, my husband and I joined in. We drew cartoons and my more artistic husband drew a ten-point buck. I think I drew a heart with stick figures representing our family and we all signed our names beneath. My husband had a dart gun and we even shot off a few rounds in a designated target he’d drawn on the wall – and yes, we were quite young then.

I can only imagine what the house’s subsequent owners thought when they removed the old paneling and found our renderings. We’d left a sort of history behind – our own Kilroy Was Here sign everywhere we’ve lived, except for the two apartments and the one home we had built when we lived in Lubbock, Texas. I loved that house, but there was nothing to fix-up. It was perfect. Too perfect. I had nothing to dream about, no plans for demolition or even a need to paint a wall. The sale had included professional landscaping. There was nothing to do. Unlike my present home which has been a constant work-in-progress.

The newly rediscovered grid lines will be painted over this time and lost forever. They live on in my mind of another time when another young couple made a house into their home. This isn’t one of those “Look what treasure we found in the attic” stories. It is simply a reminder that we all are leaving mementos of our lives scrawled on top of memories made by others and sometimes left on walls for others to find. I think our stories do the same. What we write today, we hope will be read again and again by new generations. Perhaps our tales will explain a bit about how life was when we wrote it.

I hope my stories hold up longer than those mirror tiles were in style. If they turn out to be only half as flashy as those tiles, I know I’ll be remembered. As to whether my writing style finds favor through the years, well that’s another story.