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Essay on Where Will We Sleep in this Big Old House?

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While sitting on the porch after I’d finished exploring the guest book, I recall Deb and Dad joining me to discuss what bedrooms we’d be using. I took a brief survey of the possibilities in my mind. The maid’s quarters had three bedrooms, the upstairs proper had five bedrooms, and downstairs there was the master bedroom and a room next to it with a bed. The only problem I saw with where to sleep was having too many choices. With three of us in residence, the downstairs option would only accommodate two and no one was interested in being marooned in some distant corner of what some locals thought was a haunted house. The rooms in the maid’s quarters had more serious weather damage than in the rest of the house, and they were small and had…show more content…
Dad explained, “Apparently when this room was repainted around 1920, and motor oil was substituted for linseed oil.” Each of us pressed our thumb into the bright yellow doorjamb to sample the paint that was still sticky. The formula produced a paint that had not dried during the forty-year interim. I was no longer surprised to see that Alson Clark had left his artistic touch in this room too. Baskets of painted flowers decorated the open spaces toward the top of the eleven-and-a-half-foot walls.
The room was larger than the tower room and the windows faced the same directions. The only drawback I noticed was the bed was located five feet or more from the optimal view. A door to the next room created a corridor that passed the channel side view. Furthermore, the windows facing the Narrows needed unoccupied space in front of them to access a small outside porch.
Dad knew which room he’d be taking before he left California. He, and Mom too when she moved in, would stay in the bedroom at the head of the stairs. It is a spacious room with a fireplace in the right hand corner. Two large windows look out at Keewaydin, which is a property across the back channel on the New York main shore. I took a close-up look out the window next to the fireplace, and I could see the coalhouse dock with the Buzz tied up there.
Two more windows were to my left as I entered the room. These windows looked down the main shipping channel. The
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