"Houses have so many stories to tell."

So wrote the late Virginia “Chris” Wood in her self-published book The Houses and Other Stories. Whether a childhood room, apartment or home, a college dormitory, or a senior residential community, the details of people’s surroundings never cease to fascinate me. Who can forget Mary Karr’s description of her backyard, where her mother burned a pile of furniture, toys, and clothes, in her memoir The Liars’ Club?

I cannot forget my first bedroom, my blue wicker bed, the creaks in three floorboards, the Beatrix Potter prints on the walls, the alligator named Looey Sooey that lived under my bed.

When it is time to write, try starting with a description of your favorite home, room by room, and see how the memories flow. I leave you with a detail of Chris Wood's house from her first book, Unredeemable Time. (Points if you know the source of that title without looking it up!)

Our old house had been stucco and stucco-colored. It remained so for years until it was painted an odd but soft peach color, the result of Ma’s unremitting efforts to loosen Pa from his baked-bean antipathy towards any kind of color in the domestic realm.

—Virginia C. Wood, Unredeemable Time

September Question:

What is one specific and outstanding memory of your childhood home?

Answers from the staff

Liz Sonnenberg: In one of my childhood homes there was a ghost named Mrs. Pink.

Ali de Groot: There was a laundry chute on both floors of our house, in which you could throw your dirty clothes and they would slide down to the basement floor, landing just next to the washing machine.

Megan St. Marie: The backyard of my childhood home was bordered with lilac bushes, which always bloomed right around my birthday. The scent of lilacs always brings me back to happy times of play and celebration.

Sean St. Marie: I remember the bare spots my friends and I wore into the lawn playing wiffleball all day and using an overturned wheelbarrow for a strike zone.