January 29, 2020

Do you remember plastic curtains? Are they even a thing, anymore? I ask because we have very recently installed new curtains in our living room. They went up just a few days ago. They’re burgundy in color, and we ordered them online. They were advertised as thermal black-out drapes, they have grommets—and our daughter had to help her daddy hang them, because he couldn’t get the folding right. In the interest of full disclosure, I don’t think I could have, either. 

In the first place that we lived in back in 1972, we had plastic curtains. It was an apartment in the middle of a big city, and covering the windows was a priority for privacy’s sake. We were, after all, newlyweds. It only cost us five dollars for the pair, and we hung them in front of our living room window, which was one of only two windows in the whole place.

I’m almost positive we took those plastic curtains with us a year later when we left the city. We moved back to the country and into the house in which I lived my first five years of life. The house belonged to my mother at the time. When we moved next door when I was five, my parents kept the first, smaller house as an income property. David and I and our firstborn moved in after Mother had to evict her previous tenant for not paying the rent.

For my part, I had been living in the city for the first time in my life and it hadn’t gone well for me. I felt ill all the time, I remember, I think because I simply wasn’t used to the noise, or the pollution. We moved to the country around the time of our first wedding anniversary, in July.

Mother didn’t give us a break on the rent, either. She charged us what she’d charged her last tenant—75 dollars a month. There was a field that separated the house we rented from her house. This was in 1973, and we lived in that house until her death in 1976. After the funeral and the reading of the will and a discussion between my brother, my sister and I, it was decided that my sister would have the house I was in, also known as the little house; David and I would have the house that had been Mother’s, also known as the big house; and we would each of us pay our brother a set amount each month over several years. 

But back to the curtains. Over the years, we’ve had nice looking curtains, and ugly plastic ones. We’ve had sheers that I made by purchasing the material at a fabric store, putting a hem in the top, and then sliding them onto one of those flattened rods that hook onto brackets. You know the kind I mean. We’ve had icky colored curtains we’ve bought at garage sales, and even a couple of pairs we bought new from a discount store. All of them had one thing in common, and that was that they were very, very inexpensive.

Now these new ones aren’t what anyone could call expensive, not really. But I can tell you, they are the most expensive ones we’ve ever had. When I saw the burgundy drapes online, I thought of the soft brown laminate flooring we’ve installed, and the new “pale peony” color of our walls. Imagine beige with just a hint of pale pink, and that’s the color of my walls. Our current sitting furniture in that room is brown, and my electric chair is a muted blue—as if it was nearly an aqua blue but someone sprayed a light grey fog over it. And, we also have my mother’s china cabinet, which is made of maple, and was built by her father, who was a cabinet maker.

I imagined those drapes in my living room, and I thought they’d make the room “pop”. I am pleased to report that I was right! This astonishes me more than I have words to say, because I’m not very good at deciding what goes with what, color-wise. My talents don’t lie in the visual arts.

We have one more thing to do to make our living room complete—well, two actually. The first we will accomplish this week, when we go to a local furniture store and order our new sofa/twin recliner set. We’ll hopefully order it on Friday, with an expected 12-week delivery. And, we have to look for some art. We want something on the wall above the television, the one solid wall in the room. David thought that whatever we get should be longer than it is wide. I’m thinking possibly a set of three. Nothing expensive. Art collectors we are not. We just want something that will fit, that will look nice, and finish the room.

I’m feeling bold and maybe a little full of myself now, because the curtains worked out. I could be on a roll! I’m hoping that I was being honest in my answer to David when he asked me what I had in mind.

I told him I really didn’t have a clue, but I’d know it when I see it.

Love,
Morgan
http://www.morganashbury.com
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury