Sunlight hurdles through the oak's seed clusters hung like Christmas ornaments and shaped like World War II underwater bombs. In the window, a tin viking ship braces itself for impact over a window sill caught in the doldrums.
A latte berber carpet frames the floor vent beneath, room dust spinning upwards in a weather front, a bank of steam forming regiments and taking up arms on the window's southern land holdings.
An old soul of a rocking chair reclines remembering its earliest years, joined by a rust-rubbed music stand accustomed to holding Tchaikovsky's Nutracker Suite or Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever, but certainly not Hans Christian Andersen's Nightingale as it holds now.
That bejeweled nightingale gazes up from the page to "Shelly" hanging in the corner, a chandelier made from a thousand cone shells flown in from the Philippines. Shelly is a guidon for a rank of open-armed stuffed bears, horses and monkeys grinning and pensive and thinking back to your mom's embrace when she was a child herself. "Cry Bear" (you'll have to ask your mom) is the elder statesman, polar-bear white with a brown nose rubbed raw and sad eyes that are all pupil.
The crib they defend like a soccer goal stands next to a bookshelf lining up a range of usual suspects: Peter Rabbit, the Grinch, the Wizard of Oz, a Lion, a Witch, and purportedly a Wardrobe. There are others less familiar to your dad: Gracie, Five Chinese Brothers, and a story by Madeleine L'Engle that isn't a Wrinkle in Time. The pea-green wall above bears a colored chalk rendition of the Little Prince, drawn by your dad, with apologies to Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
The closet, with its closet doors long gone, is a diaper changing alcove, swirling with a metal-clipped Wee Gallery mobile, backed by a mirror hung low beside the changing table, flanked by a crowding shelf engorged with red, orange, yellow, green and blue cloth diapers, a baby wipe warmer (a "cotton burrito heater" according to your dad), and a short stack of plastic diapers running a rural print of ducks and houses.
Two framed photos of your dad in child form stand as trophy tops to the diaper shelves. One in a pastel Easter suit the day he carried a porcelain baby Jesus to the Nativity scene in front of the Holy Redeemer church's altar bearing a woodcarved image of the Last Supper, the one where everybody is sitting on the same side of the table. The second photo places your dad at the base of a ladder he was too small to climb when he was taken to an orchard to pick buckets of crab apples fallen to the dandelioned ground.
Your mom and dad hope you like what they've done with the place.
