A Collage of Memories

 Artisanship in the making. 

I’ve been working on this project for almost a year.  It started when I went rubble pile diving for some of the old wallpaper I remember from Grandpa and Grandma’s farmhouse.  Amongst the plaster dust and lathe, I managed to retrieve these few pieces.

The blue paisley revives my memories of Grandpa Eugene.  He would have me sit at the antique secretary desk next to the chimney in this room and write out the monthly bills for him.  He’d sign the checks and I’d put them in the envelopes to be mailed.  Grandpa’s birthday was in September.  He had a birthstone ring with a blue sapphire in it.  

When I look at the pretty purple floral, my memory of Grandma Ollie comes alive in my mind.  She had a beautiful four-poster bed with a handmade quilt in the room that harmonized perfectly with this wallpaper.  Her bedroom vanity drawer had a light green Youth Dew powder puff in it, along with several packs of Doublemint gum. Her favorite color was purple.

My vision started out as a collage, tearing bits and pieces into odd shapes and gluing them onto a board.  When I realized that the wallpaper didn’t tear very nicely, I succumbed to the ruler and Exacto knife.  Working with a copycat patchwork design I found online, eventually, the pieces of wallpaper were formed into the geometric pattern that you see here.   A strip of the old border from the ceiling edge was cut apart and became the binding lines between the different paper designs.  Mod podge is wonderful to work with.  After 4 coats over the paper onto the artist’s canvas, the panels took on the matte sheen I was looking for.  

I am not a frame-maker.  I also don’t generally purchase expensive framing from an art store.  Since the panels were 10 x 20, I didn’t anticipate finding anything at a thrift store, not to mention two of them.  Finally, after weeks of web surfing, I came upon a discount frame store in New York where I found an antique-looking off-white pattern for a wooden frame.  At their prices, I could get two frames for less than it would cost to have one framed at a local art store.  Since I didn’t need a mat or glass, I felt pretty confident in doing this special order online, knowing well that I would not be able to return the frames if they didn’t fit.

This seemed too good to be true!  And it was.  Three weeks after my credit card was charged, I received an email that the frames were on backorder and was asked if I wanted to cancel.  No!  I would wait!  Two weeks later, I received an email saying the frame I had chosen was discontinued.  Drat!  Back to the online search with this company.  

Next, I found a black wooden frame with carvings on it, similar to the white rustic one I’d ordered.  I asked the company to replace my order with this design. The frames arrived two weeks later - apparently further delayed because the company moved to a larger factory in Connecticut.  

Yay!  The panels fit perfectly!  But it seems like I can never totally put my paintbrushes

away.

After a coat of off-white paint, followed by a wiping of nutmeg brown paint in the carvings, and nearly a year’s time in the making, my Pfund Farmhouse prints are finished!  The memories that are propagated through these prints are finally sealed in time.

Grandpa

E. R. Pfund.  Grandpa’s driver’s license slipped out of the manila envelope onto the kitchen table.  I’d been rummaging through some old papers in a tote from the farmhouse that contained so many interesting things that had been saved. 

It was a driver’s license that expired on September 12, 1973.  Signed by E. R. Pfund. Grandpa never made it to that day - he passed away on March 9 of 1973, at the age of 76.  I was in 8th grade.

As the school bus pulled into the driveway of our little pickle chip green colored house on highway 37 on that day so many, many years ago, I quickly noticed both of my aunt’s cars parked in our driveway.  My stomach knotted up into a tight wad of fear.  I knew that Grandpa had been in the hospital.  

Once inside the house, my fear became reality.  Grandpa was gone.

I tilted my head down to look at the now ancient driver’s license as a tear puddled in the corner of my eye.  When I was younger, Grandpa had told me that one day I could be his chauffeur.  I could drive him around wherever he needed to go.  

That childhood dream never happened.

E. R. Pfund. I miss my grandpa. Let the tears puddle.

The Yellow Rose Wallpaper

I tiptoed delicately around the ridges of snow and ice that the tire tracks had left behind, not wanting to fill my shoes with the wet, freezing mixture.  As I neared the pile of rubble below the balcony door, I prayed that I would find a shred of the wallpaper. The rubble had been haphazardly pushed into a pile, intertwining the plaster and lathe with shreds of paneling and wallpaper - all mixed in with a light dusting of snow from earlier in the day. I picked up a piece of the lathe to dig with.  Wedged underneath a section of the wall, I saw the yellow rose and gingham check pattern I’d been hoping to find. By now, the snow had packed into the sides of the shoes I was wearing.  Cold feet and all, I tugged at a large piece of the wallpaper, but it was still glued to a piece of plaster.  I grabbed a piece next to it that was loose. It’s yellow roses and gingham checks still intact, I’d found the wallpaper from my bedroom at our farmhouse.

As a thirteen-year-old, I begrudgingly moved to the farmhouse with my family after my grandpa died.  I dug my heels into all the plans that Mom and Dad had made.  They tried everything.  “You’ll have your own bedroom.  You can pick out the carpet.  You can pick out what you want on the walls.  You can have wallpaper if you want.”  I was determined to hate it there. Not because it was a less than desirable place to live - the farmhouse was a huge home with seven rooms upstairs and six downstairs.  But because I didn’t want things to change.  I wanted my grandpa to be alive and I wanted life to stay as it had been forever and ever.

With careful hands, I loosely rolled the yellow rose and gingham check patterned wallpaper and grasped it with my gloved hand, and headed toward the farmhouse door.  The door opened almost effortlessly, just as it had ever since I could remember.  I stepped inside and immediately was overcome by the boundless expanse of the empty farmhouse. The plaster and lathe were gone - all that remained were the wooden studs that had once defined the rooms that our lives revolved around.  I peered up through the ceiling where the staircase once was to see my bedroom, and I carefully climbed up the makeshift ladder to the second floor.

Dad and I had wallpapered my bedroom one Saturday.  It took us all day - or maybe longer.  Dad's mathematical skills came in handy as we cut and pasted each piece, plumb, and level onto the seventy-five-year-old sandy plaster walls.  “We don’t want this to fall down,” Dad said.  I didn’t want it to fall down either.  I’d finally resolved to the fact that we were indeed moving into the farmhouse.  The loss of Grandpa was still in my mind, but my grandpa had grown up in the farmhouse, and just maybe Grandpa wanted me to be happy within its walls, just like he had been.

The snow pile outside glistened as the late afternoon sun sank in the sky.  Standing in my bedroom, I stared at the vastness of the second story. I could see from one end of the farmhouse to the other.  East to west. North to south. My bedroom.  My sister’s room.  My brother’s room.  The sewing room, where Mom and I had stitched many hours away.  We lost my dad in the fall and the farmhouse had passed to another generation.  In the coming months, new life would once again be breathed into the farmhouse.  My bedroom would become my granddaughter’s bedroom.  

The color was a grayish purple.  I balanced myself guardedly on the stepladder, hanging tightly onto the top step as I meticulously brushed the soothing color on the top edge of the one-hundred-year-old wall.  I was ever-so-careful not to get a speck on the freshly painted white ceiling. “We want this to be a perfectly straight line,” I told my granddaughter, as she doused her paint roller in the tray on the floor. I was overjoyed that there would be another family in the farmhouse. The loss of my dad was still fresh in my mind, but I knew that I wanted my granddaughter to be as happy within the walls of the second story bedroom as I had been.

Except for the piece I salvaged that day, the yellow rose gingham checked wallpaper is gone.  I imagine my dad would say, “it’s just wallpaper.”  

I imagine I would politely argue with my dad just a bit.  “It’s yellow rose gingham checked wallpaper.  Permeated with memories.”