I hope that everybody had a happy Thanksgiving. Ours was great, full of turkey and pie and poker, and The Hub and I being able to watch The Polar Express with my niece and nephew.

We tried to do some Christmas shopping on Black Friday, but when we woke up at 5:30 in the morning, we just looked at each other and then went back to bed. The K-bird doesn’t even peep at that time of the morning. Even the dog just looked at us and yawned. I’ve turned my entire household into a bunch of owls, except the cat, who was nocturnal to begin with. I don’t even think the gold fish get up early. In as much as gold fish ever get up.

Rob and Theresa came up for our semi-traditional Christmas tree hunt on Friday. The last few years, we’ve gone out to local tree farms to cut down our own trees. But, it was almost 70 degrees and we couldn’t get into it, so we put it off until next week.

We changed the living room around, though, in order to make space for the tree we didn’t get....

The Hub took down a cornice piece that my dad had made over the large window years ago, when my parents first moved into the house. After 30 years, it didn’t look so hot. Of course, as soon as we took it down we were confronted with the old paint and wallpaper that had been covered up all that time. That brought back memories!

When my folks bought that house, it was an absolute disaster. There was a battleship gray rug on the floor in the living room, which smelled so strongly of dog urine that we pulled it up before the movers even got everything into the house. The walls were painted the same color and accented with a blue gray wallpaper which was almost impossible to get off. The trim was also painted gray, or maybe it had been white at one time and was just that dirty. It was hard to tell.

The bedrooms were worse. All we did for days at a time was scrape off wallpaper in those rooms and each coat was more appalling than the last. The kitchen and the bathroom were that 1950’s shade of pink that I could never stand. There was bright pink shag carpeting in the bathroom, and pink formica in the kitchen. The counter tops were trying to be lined with aluminum strips that were falling off. Everywhere you looked something needed to be done. There was burlap fabric glued to the walls of the dining room – it was also gray- and all the window blinds were made out of plastic but were supposed to look like bamboo.

An elderly lady, who had not been able to keep the place up properly, had owned the house before my folks. She was such a sweet, kind lady, who finally got to go to Florida after all those years (lets face it, you could tell by the décor that she was really pining for Florida in the worst possible way)…we didn’t have the heart to say anything mean about her. Though we came close when my mother found a ton of dead flies in the oven and my father had to haul three pickup truck loads of mostly old newspapers out of the attic down to the county dump.

However, since we had never met her husband, whose enthusiasm for do-it-yourself “home improvements” was rivaled only by his incompetence, we felt okay about cursing him roundly.

Everything that was not glued to the walls was coming apart, doorknobs came off in our hands, the movers ripped us off, the dog was freaked out, the entire house was filthy, the lawn was overgrown, the driveway was prone to flooding, the drawers didn’t fit properly in their cabinets in the kitchen and the bathroom, somebody opened the flu to the fireplace and several pounds of debris fell out onto the hearth, one of the bedroom doors had been wallpapered in bumper stickers, the place had no air conditioning and we had the strong suspicion that the heat didn’t work very well either, the hot water heater was too small to serve the house, and all of us, including my grandmother who had already overcome a great deal of adversity in life, were afraid that if we turned the stove on it might explode.

Weirdly, I remember that time as being some of the best days of my life. All of us were so thrilled to have finally moved away from The Land that Time Forgot that we were unfailingly optimistic and full of hope. Our neighbors were normal. Once the lawn was beaten back, we discovered the whole yard was full of flowering plants. The house was full of natural light, especially during the time between my father throwing the ghastly faux bamboo things onto the dump pile and when my parents could afford curtains – which had to be customized because the windows were all non-standard sizes.

Looking back on it, my father might have been about to have a nervous breakdown, but for some reason he gave up on his serious, teacherly model of parenthood, and began to entertain us at meal times by reading out of women’s magazines in intonations completely inappropriate to the contents of the articles. He changed his eyeglasses so that they no longer turned dark in the sunlight, and for the first time in years, I could see his eyes, so he looked like a human being again. While we spent hours using vinegar and water to strip off wallpaper, paint, and plain old dirt in the sweltering bedrooms he carried on hysterically funny, detailed stories of a spy from Wiesbadden, West Germany named Philapina Ledbetter. He sounded like Elmore Leonard on an acid trip, but every time one of us would try to trip him up on some plot detail, he’d invent an explanation even more outrageous than the story line itself, and he kept all of these details straight in his head for days and weeks at a time. I knew then that he knew perfectly well where I’d gotten my ability to tell a fine story from – but he’d had his light under a bushel basket for years.

When we went to mass at the new church, he flashed the hippie peace sign, the two fingered “V”, at us when the pompous middle-aged priest-on-his-way up, intoned “Let us extend to one another a sign of Christ’s peace”

For the first time in my memory, my family was united in a common cause, which was to turn that house into the hope for our future. Each one of us hoped different things of course. I hoped to go to public school and make new friends, which I did, albeit wearing a clunky and ultimately ineffective back brace. My brother hoped for new, unexplored bike paths, guys his own age to hang out with, and a ten speed. My mother, free of the interminable road noise and frankly bizarre behavior of most of our old neighbors in The Land That Time Forgot, hoped for peace and quiet. I think my father hoped to paint all the rooms a calming white, have less than 50 pounds of trash per week, and pay the whole thing off before he died. At that point, we thought we might ALL be dead before that house was ever in livable condition. But until then, we had sub sandwiches for dinner and Philapina Ledbetter for company.

Even the dog, who the old neighbors had teased mercilessly, experienced an improved quality of life, and learned how to walk on a leash.

So, when I called my folks and told them that the last remnant of that wallpaper had finally come off, they were thrilled, and came to visit us on Sunday. Maybe they didn’t come to visit us, but to see the new curtains instead. We all tried to explain the extent of the ruin we’d gotten ourselves into in 1977 to The Hub, but he couldn’t really grasp it. He hadn’t Been There, not even in his wildest home improvement projects.

After all, you had to experience it to believe it, but there just aren’t words to describe all of that. Or maybe there are.

“Peace be with you”