Playing ‘house’…

It all started with my sister Barbara whose favorite game was playing ‘house’. We’d arrange rocks in the pattern of walls in a nearby copse of trees where a soft expanse of fallen pine needles made a cozy backdrop – in our mind, luxurious wall-to-wall carpeting. Then we’d change the walls. ‘We need a door here,’ my sister would insist, ‘a window over there.’

So the rocks would move to form a whole new configuration. And it would go on and on, including the furnishings. A ‘sofa’, a ‘chair’ made of more rocks, and sometimes in a burst of creativity, a real card table swiftly carried to the spot that she’d drape with towels to simulate the illusion of an intimate boudoir.

I don’t think my brother Tim ever joined us, disdaining Barb’s ‘domestic arts’ in favor of his usual, decidedly more manly pursuits: making model airplanes that actually flew, building skyscrapers with his Erector set, conducting smelly chemical and/or dazzling electrical experiments that awed and shocked but which never truly allured me – science moron that I am. Alas, all his Mister Wizard stuff gone to waste.

The closest Tim came, I recall, was detailing to me one night his ‘ideal home’ that would be nothing more than a series of rooms lined with open shelves from which he could easily pluck socks, shoes, underclothes, knapsacks, arrowheads, weird camping utensils, ham radios, razor blades, flashlights, cherry bombs, knives, swords, machine guns, etc. – all his usual ‘essentials’ - without the necessity of opening any cupboards or doors.

His nightmarish scenario scared me so much for decades that I am still playing ‘house’ in my sister’s mode – only now the walls are three-dimensional and I have real furniture to move around and to re-arrange.

I was at it again this morning, taking advantage of Francesco’s temporary absence to practice a little furniture realignment while the chief cat was away and I could play. Target: the living room that, in my mind now, is more sensibly comfortable by virtue of moving a beautiful antique bureau and two upholstered fauteuils that were languishing, unused, in the other house; by shifting the sofa from the wall to in front of the fireplace, adding a few lamps and other bric-a-brac, etc.

What do you know? Playing ‘house’ is still loads of fun.