I was the only girl, so I got my own bedroom. It was upstairs in our home but had one slanting ceiling. I loved it. Mom painted the room light blue when we had the house built and it was a Holly Hobby theme. Later, I had it painted pink and white. I loved all the angles and corners in the room, although I did bump my head a few times. My room was my sanctuary. I spent hours there (just ask my brothers). I had my own world going on. I was always a dreamer, making up stories...sometimes writing them down but many times, living them out through my Barbies, Dawn Dolls and paper dolls...my imagination ran wild.
Each doll had a name that it still has today. Each one had a personality, certain friends, liked certain clothes. My neighbor, and best friend growing up, would come and add her Barbies and we had a real Soap Opera Serial going on!! We would spend hours playing...an old Ed Ames record played music as our dolls danced, various parts of the room would be homes, I could go on and on. What a world we lived in!! I loved it.
I spent hours in my room reading as well. I doubt you could count the books I read in there! It was where I could get away from what I percieved as my "trials" in life! Growing up, at times, was difficult for me , because of so many things that I didn't understand...such as why I had to dress or be a certain way. I felt like I never made my own decisions and I was very dramatic! I rarely rebelled on the outside but I sure did on the inside. I guess most kids go through these kind of things as they grow up. I took mine very hard. My walls could tell many stories of things I said outloud that never left my room.
I have had trouble falling asleep my whole life. While laying there trying so hard to sleep, I could hear everything going on in the house downstairs. Years later, my mom slept in there and was amazed at how I ever went to sleep with all the sounds. I spent many hours feeding my imagination as I tried to sleep. However, in the mornings, it was hard to get up!! My mom would yell up the stairs to get out of bed, and I would lean over and hit the floor with my hands so she would think I gotten up. Then I would lay there a little longer. She told me later that she knew that was what I was doing. It seems silly now but I remember as a child, the nights my mom would be out late at a women's church event. I would worry what would happen to us if she was in an accident and didn't come home. I would lay in bed worrying until I heard her pull in the driveway. I never, ever went to sleep before she got home...and I never told about it....I don't know why.
The furniture in my room was a dark, beautiful wood that had been my grandparents first bedroom set after they married. It was old but I liked it. I like the big round mirror that sat atop the dresser and the tall bedposts at the end and top of the bed. When I was a teenager, my grandmother found purple bedsprings that we put under my bed (purple was my new color) and though they were kind of noisey, I loved them. My mom got rid of them as soon as I moved out! :) I also loved the bubble light that hung next to my bed that I would read by and the crocheted plant holder my great-grandmother gave me. I always had a plant in it, near the window.
At night, my brothers, would knock on the wall and I would answer back. Sometimes I would start, and they always answered. It was the old knock that everyone knows....the five raps, ending with the two raps....the most famous knock in the world! It makes me smile to remember.
My favorite part of my room was the view out of the window. We lived in the country and there was a corn field across the road from us. On the other side of the cornfield, was a pond and beyond the pond was Route 104. I could see all these things from my window. The sun set over that pond every evening. Out that window, I saw sunsets, growing corn in the summer and white snow in the winter. One of the last things I did when I left the house for the last time, was gaze out that window at my view that was my own for 17 years before moving out to be married.
The most important thing that ever happened to me was in that room. One Sunday, on the way home from church, I told my parents that I wanted to accept Christ as my Savior. My dad took me to my room, we read some passages from the Bible and I knelt at my bed and asked Christ to save me. Right there in my pink and white room! :)
I had sleepovers with so many friends there, cried my heart out when my boyfriend in tenth grade broke up with me, railed against what I perceived as unfair rules, was woken up on birthdays by mom "trying" to play Happy Birthday on the piano and I enjoyed the rare nights my dad would come up and rub my feet when they were cramping and tell me stories of when he was little. I lay in bed many nights on Christmas Eve listening for Santa's reindeer to land on the roof and was SURE I heard the rustling of him wrapping our presents! I spent countless hours dreaming of my future, what I would be like, how many kids I would have and who Mr. Right would be.
And there was the Ohio State Basketball poster that I taped to the back of my door that I Ioved so much. It had my favorite players on it, Steve Winters, Larry Bolden and Craig Taylor. It was on the door for so long, that when I got married, it wouldn't come off so I could take it with me. When we sold the house, Steve took a razor and got it off for me. I loved that poster! There were the years of Abandon, my cat, sleeping on my feet at night. Such a familiar feeling. Then there was the spot on the rug where our dog, Bobo got sick and mom tried her best to get all of the stain out but never could!. And the little rocking chair that belonged to my grandmother and my mom and then to me. I would put my dolls in it. It sat in the same spot year after year, reminding me of my past and giving me hope for my future.
So many memories of my bedroom. I could never list them all. Last time I left there, most signs of my being there were gone, packed up and put in boxes or brought to my home in Virginia. Yet, it will always remain my room. Some memories are so ingrained, that even external changes cannot hid the fact of what was. No matter whose room it is now, if they listen hard enough, they will hear the sounds of a little girl's imagination.......
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