Memory Door

My childhood memories are full of days at my paternal grandparents' farm just outside of Eagle Grove, Iowa.

A snapshot image of ice-covered snow, encrusted, bending, grasses, and sparkling fence; the sharp pain of my tongue stuck to the old school bell that sat outside the garage; the big circle of family opening Christmas presents in the kitchen; the taste of candy cough drops while watching the compass turn in the front seat of the big Buick; the taste of roast beef, jarlsburg cod, and lefsa; the doctor's office in town after i stepped on a big rusty nail in the farmyard; the enormous yellow and black corn spiders that surely started my arachnophobia ...

In many cases, those memories are literally 'housed' in the architecture of the big yellow farmhouse. From the dank basement with its treasure-trove of deep freeze delicacies and old chemistry sets to the freezing/stifling attic and its dusty stacks of old furniture, books, and material memory, that house shaped my childhood. The love, faith, humor, practicality, and loyalty of that family might well have soaked into the walls.

When my grandparents were no longer able to live alone on the farm and moved to my aunt's house an hour away, my aunts and uncles agreed that, much as they loved that old house, it was too aged to really attract another owner. And, none of us were willing to risk our beloved farmhouse become another of those empty staring wreaks that increasingly dotted the rural landscapes as small family farms became more and more a thing of the past.

So the house, most of the trees, and all the farm buildings came down.

Before it did, though, true to the frugal, memory loyalty of the family, there was much scavenging. The cabinets from the kitchen moved eventually to my Aunt Carmen's. Carmen and Leonard reclaimed the wood from one of the farmstead's prominent trees and made little stools for each of us. My dad rescued the newel posts from the front stair with plans to make a plant stand (or something. the post is still in the garage, i believe). Inspired by an earlier architectural scavenge by our Aunt Julie, my sister and I each requested one of the front doors. One day, we said, we'd make them into coffee tables like Julie had.

Several years passed.

When Anna and I moved back to Minnesota from New York, my parents announced that it was time for us to take over storage responsibility for the door. It moved into our basement, the heavy, beveled glass of its window wrapped carefully in an old curtain. Looking at the door with its many layers of age-coated varnish, I felt pangs of guilt, but couldn't bring myself to take on the huge project of stripping it.

Then one year my parents decided it was time to move on the project. Carmen and Leonard had mentioned that Uncle Leonard's nephew had some real carpentry skill and, looking at photos of Julie's table, had thought he'd be able to do the conversion. Somehow, the doors made their way to Iowa.

That Christmas, our gifts included little check boxes with photos of Julie's table in them. Sometime later, the unfinished pieces of the doors cum coffee tables arrived at my parents.

And they sat there for a couple more years.

This fall, when I brought our furniture from Champaign to DC, I hauled along the pieces of the door. Every couple days, i'd haul a piece outside and, sitting on a piece of cardboard in the concrete patio of our building, sand away at it, getting ready to stain.

As we got closer and closer to the finishing part of the project, I became more and more nervous about doing the project in DC. We had no indoor place to do the work, let alone leave the stained and poly'd door to dry. Luckily, my mom's brother and sister-in-law live nearby, in WV, and willingly offered space in Rich's work room.

I moved the door there and slowly continued the work.

With my dad's help, Anna and I stained and poly'd the door over Thanksgiving, but had to leave it there to dry when we left.

At Christmas time, we hauled the door all the way from West Virginia to Minnesota and then back to D.C.

But we had forgotten the pieces of molding that would attach the glass to the door. So we had to wait until I remembered to ask Rich and Rusty if they'd send them. And then I kept forgetting to get screws to attach the moldings to the frame.

Last Saturday the pieces were finally all together.

So now a very special piece of those farm memories is sitting in our living room. Since it left the farmhouse that door has been in almost every place we've lived. Every aunt or uncle on both sides of my family has had some role in making it into a coffee table. It is very special to me.

If you come to visit, we might even let you set a glass of wine on a coaster on top of it...