It's odd how present-day sensations bring the past home to us.
My grandmother lived in the most wonderful old house. It was a storey-and-a-half with broad dormer windows across the front and the back. No, it was not a Craftsman bungalow. Except for the dormer windows, it bespoke Southern colonial, for it featured a grand Palladian top light, diamond-paned side lights, and a grand staircase that arose from a circular newel post. The handrail did not stop and start where the stair turned three-fourths of the way up. Instead, it wound its way up, like a roller coaster track.
I loved to sit on the stairs, about ten or twelve steps up, and look out over the center hall with the broad front door flanked by side and top lights. The hallway was at least twelve feet wide. My mother said she and her friends used to dance there. They would roll up the rug and dance to the tunes of the 1930s.
A table stood in the hallway, beside the stairs, and held the telephone. It was black. When I was little, it was a candlestick phone without a dial. When you picked up the receiver, the operator came on the line and said, “Number, please.” My grandmother’s number was 8-5.
I was probably in junior high school when she received a phone with a rotary dial. It wasn’t quite the same, dialing a number as opposed to telling an operator that you wanted to talk to this number or that. If you said the name of the person you wanted to talk to, she would say again, “Number, please.”
If the telephone rang while I was sitting on the steps, I’d slide over, grip the balusters and peer through the gap between them as my grandmother spoke to the caller. I recall that she didn’t seem to think much of my sitting there and watching her talk on the telephone.
I also remember bumping down the stairs. In those days, the risers weren’t as tall as they are, now. They also weren’t carpeted. Thus, my brother, my cousins, and I would sit on the landing and slide down the steps on our posteriors, bump-bump-bump, to see how far down we could slide without stopping. In all honesty, I must confess that we seemed to engage in this activity most often after lunch. That was when my grandfather was taking a nap. Of course, my mother, aunt, or grandmother would hurry out to tell us to shush. I can’t imagine why we seemed to choose that time to bump down the stairs. Maybe it was because the day seemed to be its quietest in that hour after lunch. Our grandparents must have been greatly relieved when it was time for us to go home.
Many years later, my husband and I were looking at a model home. As I walked down the stairs, I saw the front door with the top and side lights and realized I had seen that view before. Of course! At my grandmother’s house! While my husband and the sales agent “talked business,” I sat on the stairs, about ten or twelve steps up, and enjoyed that very nostalgic view. I did not, however, attempt to bump down the stairs.
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