The Yarn Barn

Grandmother Vinita’s house in Denton wasn’t anything like storybook grandmothers’ houses. Sure, it was a Victorian house, but in a severe Greek Revival style. No fancy gables or porches or columns. The interior, despite soaring 12-foot ceilings, enormous windows, and wide plank wooden floors blackened with age, was cluttered and uncomfortable. She only ever heated or cooled one room, her “dining” room that was really her “everything” room. Every other room in the house was either freezing cold or brutally hot, depending on the season. The fact that all the windows were painted shut didn’t help. Except for a box of Lincoln Logs, there were no toys, puzzles, or children’s books in the house. Just heavy, ornate walnut furniture, uncomfortable narrow beds, and so much stuff.

There were a few entertainments to be found by a creative and restless child. The incredibly heavy cannonball on the hearth was a challenge to be hefted by my skinny arms. A trunk full of old curtains became queen’s robes for draping and swishing. The dried stalks of the daylilies in the yard were short-lived swords for dueling with my sister. A wooden swing hanging from a backyard tree challenged us to soar high enough to touch the eaves of the house with our toes. Kit could manage it; my short legs couldn't quite reach.

But the best entertainment was the jack loom that occupied one corner of the dining room. If Grandmother was working on a project, I could sit next to her on the bench and help by throwing the shuttle across to her and pulling the beater against the fabric to tighten the cloth. They rhythmic percussion of the weaving and the intoxicating smell and texture of the wool made me forget the heat and discomfort.

The loom was fed by an enormous collection of yarn that Grandmother kept in a backyard shed called the Yarn Barn. The Yarn Barn was about the size of a one-car garage, and it was lined with shelves overflowing with yarn of every type and color. And when I say overflowing, I mean it was a disastrous mess. Skeins of yarn, balls of yarn, wads of yarn, boxes of yarn, bags of yarn, on the shelves, spilling off the shelves, on the table in the middle of the shed. One hot summer day, my sister and I decided we would organize it. We were bored to madness or we never would have contemplated such folly.

It took us about three days. Sorting, untangling, and balling yarn using the yarn swift clamped to the table. We organized yarn by type and color. We got everything off the floor and onto shelves or into containers. We discarded the useless little bits and ends of yarn. We dusted and swept every corner of that shed. When we showed off the result to Grandmother, she was truly surprised and pleased, but it didn’t take many months before she stirred it all back up into a complete mess again.

Grandmother sold her house years ago and moved first to a retirement community, which she hated, then to a small house in Fort Worth near my mom. Most of the fabulous furniture and interesting collectibles were sold too. Even now, having spent my adult life in the low quality tract or manufactured homes that are all my "professional salary" can aspire to, I regret the loss of that house. I miss the wavy handmade glass of the windows, the detail of the woodwork, the red hand-printed wallpaper in the entry, the pegged oak floors. I drove by with my kids years later. It had been converted to an architect's office. The green front yard is a parking lot. The banks of daylilies are gone. The shutters on the front of the house are ripped away. The homes on either side are office buildings now too. I stopped and went in to say hello. They allowed me to wander around the house. The yarn barn is still there, used to store blueprints, still shabby and still smelling strongly of wool. I stood there, sniffing, and the past seemed so far away and so near.

Going to the Movies

Some things that seem quite trivial on the surface stick with you over time, like those little burrs from wild carrots that embed themselves into the hems of your clothes and persist to annoy you at unexpected moments weeks or even months later. Sooner or later, you sit down and pick that damned seedpod out of the threads of the fabric and think to yourself, how did this tiny thing survive five trips through the laundry?  So you get out a magnifying glass or a microscope and take a closer look to see what made it stick so well.

This memory is a burr.

When I was a child, the only way to see a movie was to go to a theater. We didn’t go often because money was always tight, or at least Mom said it was whenever we asked for anything. Usually we got to go see the animated Disney features when they came to the local theater though. Mom had promised to take us to see Aristocats, and we were crazy excited. We’d seen the trailer and memorized the “We are Siamese” song, which we sang loudly, bouncing in the back seat of the Torino, as we headed to the theater for the matinee.

Of course we were running late. We were always running late. It is a constant of all of my memories, this lateness. I have no doubt that Mom was late to her own birth and will be late to her own funeral. The poor organist will keel over from exhaustion waiting for her.

Anyway, there we were, in the car, our excitement chilling as Mom got more stressed and angry, checking her watch and muttering to herself. Finally we pulled into the theater parking lot, a good quarter hour past the start of the matinee.

“Well, what do you want to do?” Mom asked, turning back to look at us. “Should we stay for the more expensive show later, or go home?”

Kit and I knew damned well that this was a trap. We’d sprung a thousand such before. We stared at each other with apprehension, our eyes speaking paragraphs. Ask Mom, who was always pinching pennies, to spend more money? Risky move. Ask her to go back home after she swore and swerved through Dallas Saturday traffic to get here? Probably dangerous. Sit there forever and say nothing? Tempting, but unfortunately not an option.

“Let’s go home,” Kit said.

Mom started the car and pulled out of the parking lot. She was furious. Every angle of her body and the grip of her hands on the steering wheel was angry. On the way home, she berated us for wasting her time, making her drive all that way for nothing. We cringed in the back seat as the waves of her rage washed over us, saying nothing, our stomachs tight with anxiety, not daring to look at each other lest we burst into tears. Once again, we had failed the test. We always failed. We tried so hard, but somehow it never worked.