RUGS

New rug

5 Likes, 3 Comments - Cindy Maddera (@elephant_soap) on Instagram: "New rug"

The living room rug was the same rug that sat under the dining room table in my childhood home. It is a large braided rug of different shades of blue. Maybe there is a glint of yellow here and there. That rug has to be at least the same age as I am. I don't remember a time when it was not in that house. The braided mix of blues are twisted into my memories just as tightly as it is woven. I think there was a time that this rug was in the den or maybe the living room. It moved around the house depending on my mother's moods. Mostly though, I remember it under the dining room table, the place my family would gather around every Sunday until one by one, us kids flew the nest. The dining room table remained the central gathering place for holiday meals and birthday celebrations and just regular visits, but the frequency of gatherings changed as our family shifted like tectonic plates, forming continents of our own.

I don't know the circumstances of how that rug came to be free right around the time Chris and I moved to KCMO. Mom had put a new rug in the dining room ages ago, but still held on to the blue braided rug, moving it around rooms. Any way, we moved with hardly any real furniture and needed a rug. Mom gave us the rug. Just another piece of hand-me-down home furnishing. I am the Peter Pan of home furnishings. I didn't buy my first couch until my late thirties and even then it was more of a love seat than a couch. Up until then, couches and bed frames and even some chairs where all pieces that friends or family had grown tired of and replaced with something new. Between hand-me-downs and thrift store finds, our house was a miss matched quilt of mid century modern, industrial and 80s style. This Peter Pan has started to grow up and buy her own furniture. Sure a lot of it has come from IKEA, but at least I have put more thought and care into the pieces Michael and I have purchased. Now our style is more mid century IKEA. I still have the metal office credenza that we use for a TV stand partly because I still really like the hidden storage and partly because it is the heaviest piece of furniture on the planet. I was barely able to move it far enough from the wall to paint and even then, I moved it just enough to fit myself and a paint roller. If we one day turn this house into a rental, that credenza will be part of the deal. It stays with the house. 

Our house is morphing and changing. Michael has cleaned out and set up a space for himself in the basement. The Cabbage has six cubes of toys in the bookcase now. Her clothes have taken up one of the large drawers under my bed. That draw needs to be lifted slightly when pulled out so as not to catch on the rug. Catching on the rug causes the screws in the front of the drawer to come loose and eventually the drawer falls apart when being pulled open. I got fed up with putting the drawer back together once a month and took all of her clothes out of that drawer. I gave her two drawers in my dresser. I've spent the last two weeks constantly opening up the wrong drawers in search of my own underwear. I decided that it was time that the Cabbage had her own small dresser, so Michael and I made a trip out to IKEA to see what our options were. We picked out a dresser and then headed down to the first level where I got distracted by the rugs. It was decided that after we had touched every single rug in the department, that we would move the yuck brown rug from the dining area to Michael's new set up in the basement and the living room rug to the dining area. Then we would put a new rug in the living room. 

We rolled out the new rug yesterday. We placed old dumbbell weights on one edge to flatten the end that wanted to remain curled from being rolled into a tube for so long. The weights are lined up along the edge like a fence. Michael and I stood on the hardwood looking down at the new rug. Josephine laid down just on the other side of our 'fence'. We joked about how long it would take her to get out. It is different. I am still getting used to the idea of it in that space with the old rug moved to the living room. I walk across the new rug with my bare feet and notice how different it feels compared to the old rug. The old rug has been worn smooth. You cannot feel the braids in the rug. The new rug has texture to it. You can feel the individual cords that make up the pile of it. It feels nice under my feet.

My house has become our house. It is more layered and textured. A mix of controlled cluttered chaos. A mix of us. 

TAKE ME HOME

Stormy sidewalk

"Stormy sidewalk"

Back before they opened up the highway between Pine Bluff Arkansas and Greenville Mississippi, we'd travel across Interstate 40 over to Memphis and then follow highway 78 down through Tupelo to get to Louisville. We'd make this drive maybe once or twice a year to visit Pepaw, my Mom's siblings and their families, and Dad's Mom. There were visits with both of Dad's parents. It's just that those are early and hazy memories.  My Dad's father passed away when I was little. I vaguely remember seeing him in a hospital bed hooked up to all the machines. That was probably the summer Mom had to leave my sister and I with our Aunt Martha. That was the one time I remember flying out there. All the other times we drove, sometimes making a stop at Graceland and staring out the window at the endless fields of farmland. Sometimes we'd drive through during cotton season and you could see the bolls of cotton just cracking open to reveal the white fiber inside. Eventually the fields transition into tall pines and you'd pass logging trucks carrying recently harvested trees. 

We took this same drive down through Mississippi on our way to the beach. For miles and miles we passed signs with names of towns so familiar to me; they are etched into my skin. Tupelo. Egypt. Starkville. Louisville. I was flooded with memories of those trips back when I enjoyed visiting this place. I remember playing with baby bunnies on Aunt Martha's rabbit farm and how she made pancakes for me for dinner because I wouldn't eat the rabbit that had been cooked. I know my Uncle Jimmy said something about it, but I don't remember his words. Only Aunt Martha saying "I won't make that baby girl eat the rabbit." My first introduction to vegetarianism. I remember sitting on Pepaw's back porch that always seemed to be practically enclosed due to the tomato vines he had growing up the trellis around the porch. Every evening we'd make ice cream in one of those old aluminium and wood bucket ice cream makers. Each of us taking a turn at the crank. Pepaw loved ice cream. 

One summer we spent there was the hottest and muggiest of summers. My cousin Melissa pulled a pomegranate from my Memaw's pomegranate tree. I'd never seen or tasted pomegranate seeds before. We busted open the fruit on the concrete steps on the front of the house, the entry way no one every used. Everyone just assumed the back porch was the welcome mat into Pepaw's home. We ate those sweet and slightly tart seeds, staining our fingers and lips a bright fuchsia. I couldn't help but think I'd just been given the most exotic treat. That was the same summer Melissa found the used needle in the ditch as we walked down the street. She held it up for us all to see before dropping it back down in the ditch. That needle was a sign of the encroaching drug problem that was making it's way into the poor rural south. Even Melissa would eventually have her own battle with drug abuse. Finding that used needle was as shocking to me as the pomegranate seeds were exotic. 

I remember playing with toys Pepaw found in the seat cushions of furniture he had reupholstered. Pepaw's upholstery shop was my favorite part of every visit. The building that housed the shop was not much more than a glorified shed. There were always piles of furniture outside in various states of disrepair, waiting for their turn to get new fabric. The inside always seemed dark and dusty. Roles and roles of fabric stacked every spare inch. I loved to run my fingers over the fabrics, feeling the various textures. I can clearly see my Uncle Russel sitting at one of the machines working on something with a needle or two held between his lips. I never saw Pepaw working, but always remember going in there and finding Uncle Russel talking as he ripped apart a seat cushion or tugging a new couch cover onto a new square of foam. I always thought of it as Pepaw's shop, but now I realize that by the time I had come into the family, it had passed over to Uncle Russel's shop. 

The last time I was in Mississippi was for Pepaw's funeral, ten or twelve years ago. I don't know what it was about that trip, but I decided then that I would never go back or more like I didn't have a reason to go back. I want to say the decision to cut off that part was as abrupt as that. Instead it was more gradual. As I grew older it became easier to hear "nigger" and the disdain and judgment as they talked of people and cultures different from theirs'. I didn't know how to respond to people telling me how lucky I was to go to an all white school or how the black people where I lived "just knew their place." I knew without being told that this way of thinking was wrong and it made me shameful. Shameful for not saying anything about it and shameful for having family who could possible think this way. With every trip, I began to notice more and more the poverty of the area and the toll that poverty took on education. It was too easy to drop out and not finish high school. It was just this rolling ball of lack of education and ignorance leading to more hate and discrimination. 

I felt the tears grow hot in my eyes as we passed the exit for Louisville. By now I was a mix of emotions. Sad for the good memories that had tarnished over the years. Angry with those who I let tarnish those memories, people who never cared to come to us for a change. Not even when Dad passed. Disappointed in myself for never standing up and saying "your language and your attitudes are wrong." When we told the Cabbage we were in Mississippi, she asked "what's in Mississippi?" I replied "nothing much." This is what I felt/feel towards a place my parents have always referred to as "home". My name is carved on a stone in the cemetery where all of my ancestors are buried, yet I never felt like one of them.

But then I remember the rabbits, the pomegranate, the ice cream and I turned to Michael and said "it wasn't all bad. I loved my Pepaw and I loved my visits with him." There is a bit of peace in that truth.