I remember the slanted ceilings of the old house. The house wasn't a "dutch colonial", but it had those ceilings anyway. Why didn't I put more posters on them? Why didn't I decorate them more? I have no idea. I can't remember my thought processes from those times. Except, once in a while, I get a glimpse of what I was thinking. I'll see the light bend a certain way, or the leaves on a tree through a window and remember how it was to see that every morning when I woke up. To look out the narrow window out front and see the maple trees, see the way the light shone through the branches in the winter or the leaves in the summer. And the slanted ceilings, sliding away to the small walls where the beds reside. In the back bedroom, the beds were put so that the head was perpendicular to the slant, but in the front bedroom, they were parallel, so the ceiling gave you a sense of enclosing you. In the front bedroom you couldn't look out the windows, but the back bedroom you could. The front bedroom had the fan, that if you talked into while it was running, your voice would get all wavery. The air almost never circulated all the way to the back bedroom. No one ever heard of air conditioning back then. It was sleep and sweat all the way.
I don't know what made me think of that upstairs, but I did. Slanted ceilings, twin beds, four children, so long ago.
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And for some reason, alligators frequented the gap between the beds in the front bedroom -- but never the back.
And, ye gods, then there were those COLD dang floor tiles, apparently fastened to the flooring with asphalt... and of course the broomstick-trimmed half-wall in the front bedroom... and the carpeting on the stairs so you could slide all the way down, for the slight cost of a rug-burned and bruised-coccyx behind... and the storeroom*.
I do wonder sometimes what it looks like now, and how long it lasted in the (ha ha) "original" state.
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* How did that ever get cleaned out, btw? Did y'all just, like, back a dumpster up to the wall underneath the side window, and heave stuff out?
If I remember correctly, and I'm not sure I do, we just kept dumping stuff out of the storeroom down the steps. Dumping, dumping, dumping until we got to the back of the store room and there wasn't anything there, like a troll or something.
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