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.”
