In a Tiny Room

In my parent’s house in Buffalo, there is a bedroom at the top of the stairs.  It’s a tiny room and normal-sized people find it hard to stand up anywhere but in the middle of the room as the ceiling and walls are slanted on both sides.  This room is shaped by the angled roof and the way it was squeezed into being at the front of the house.  I love this tiny room and insist on staying in it every time I visit.  To me, once I step inside that tiny room with its slanted ceilings and window that faces the street, all my adult responsibilities seem to slide off my shoulders and pool in the depth of the carpet. 

In that tiny room, I know that down the street there is the elementary school where I still picture my 5^th grade teacher’s room to know which way north is. Further down the street is the middle school and my sister’s old house. And a little further down and to the right is the Village and the Opera House where I spent a summer as a wench in “Once Upon a Mattress”.  This makes my daughter laugh when I tell her, and emboldened, I share the spot I fell off my bike, or walked when I was angry or kissed a boy after a dance.  The buildings, the road, the town become familiar to her as the stories change them into events, occurrences, and history.

In that tiny room, I relax knowing that I will get to spend a lot of time with my parents. That for this week, they are just outside the door and not 1,500 miles away.  We will drink our shared coffee and talk.  We will eat our meals together. We will live together again for this short time.  We will sit on porches and decks and patios and use up all the words that seem to get twisted in phone lines and not as easy to get out.  They will revel in how big the kids are and make connections with them as young adults.  And the kids will laugh with them and talk to them and open up in ways I don’t ever see coming.  There is a comfort for them as well in Grammie and Papa’s house.

The porch is right under the tiny room and my favorite outdoor spot.

In that tiny room, I will make plans to see friends that I have known forever.  We will get together and talk and laugh and remember and share and whisper and scream and confide and reminisce.  We will be fifteen again for the night.  I will see family: aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, brothers, sisters, and someone’s new baby.  They will marvel at my kids and make them feel instantly connected into this amazing behemoth of a family.  My kids and Bill will marvel at all the people we are related to and ask now who is this?  How are we related?  Why is this stranger hugging me?  My daughter will ask if the party we are going to is large and I will say yes as my mother says no at the same time.  For her, it is small, for us it is gigantic.  A gargantuan grouping of people related by blood and past and love. 

In that tiny room, I will lay awake on my last night and wonder how long it will be until I lay under the slanted ceilings again.  I admit that some summers, I want to travel somewhere else.  Someplace exotic or unknown; somewhere I have only seen in pictures and want to see first-hand.  But I know that all of these places inevitably lose out to the internal compass pointing me always to Buffalo.  To family and friends and to that tiny room.  That tiny room with its slanted ceilings and window facing the street, where my heart no longer feels divided between the home of my youth and the home of the last twenty-five years; it just feels whole.