Platform Rocker

No Creature of Habit

The Massalina Drive house where we grew up had a living room, dining room, kitchen, two bedrooms and one bathroom downstairs, two bedrooms and one bathroom upstairs. Oh, and the downstairs hall, a space in the center of the house that held the space heater. It was an old-fashioned oil heater with a small, one-gallon can that held the kerosene. The 55-gallon drum was outside, and some years into the 1940s our father ran a line from the heater to the drum.

The hall was the only place to get warm after your bath on cold evenings, and while you were bathing your PJs were laying on the heater getting warm. Hot. At some time in the forties, our father also cut a hole in the hall ceiling and floor at the top of the stairs so we had heat upstairs. Seeing that the heater and the grate were both in the center of the house, we had “central heating,” didn’t we. 

There was no air conditioning then (except the Ritz Theatre and J. C. Penney’s on Harrison Avenue); our summer cooling was open windows. In time, we had an enormous attic fan at the top of the stairs, with louvres that opened automatically when the fan was turned on. A luxury cool evening was pushing my bed over against the upstairs bedroom window and putting my pillow in the windowsill and drift off to sleep with the stiff breeze coming in across my head.

The house had no “family room,” although at some point our father closed in the screen porch with sliding windows and mama put some wicker furniture out there. Our first house with a family room was the house we bought in Chula Vista, California, 1969, where we lived during that Navy sea duty assignment. It was a small, comfortable home on a hill overlooking the neighborhood. The mountains off to the east were the site of a raging forest fire while we lived there. We watched flames race furiously down our side of the mountain, scatter cinders and ash over our home, and we loaded up our cars with our family pictures and other memorabilia. 

This house on St. Andrews Bay, built by my grandparents in 1912-13, had no family room either, and did not until Linda and I expanded it in 1997 to make room for us and two mothers-in-law to live peaceably. The mothers are gone now, and the house is rattle-around-in size for two. Linda’s resting and reading place is the platform rocker in the family room, but I do not have much of a habit. The lift-chair we bought for my mother’s 98th birthday two years ago is good some mornings. So is the blue leather lounge chair we bought at Penny's Worth in Apalachicola, both of them in the family room, and sometimes the plush sofa in there. Sometimes a chair in the living room, looking out across the Bay. Or one of the chairs in the sewing room playroom looking out on the back garden. Just as often, the platform rocker in Joe’s room, a large bedroom and sitting room that we added ten years ago for my mother. Tass and Jeremy bought this rocker to rock the little girls when Caroline was tiny, and gave it to me later, very comfortable gliding, and that's where I am now and start most mornings. But not all, I'm a drifter in the house. 

In fact, when I snore at night, Linda moves to another bedroom, which she calls "the snore room," and I may lie in bed early mornings, type my blog, and have coffee while watching dawn lighten creation over St. Andrews Bay.

This is what happens when I come downstairs early and have no idea what to blog about. Open the MacBook, turn the brain off, turn the fingers on, and start typing.

TomW+ enjoying +Time