The third floor....

This old house has three floors..... we turned the third floor into a library last year, and it's filled with bookshelves that line the walls, a small sofa and comfy chairs, and a few tables that hold open books, like my vintage volume of the Sherlock Holmes stories. How can you have a library without Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? Or Charles Dickens? Or Edith Wharton?

When I was eMailing my cousin F the other day, we got to talking about childhood memories, which made me remember the house I grew up in.  That particular house also had three floors, and the third floor was my playroom. I had bookshelves lining one wall, a play-kitchen on another wall, and Lionel trains set up on tracks in the middle of the floor.

In this house, I go up to the third floor library and dust the shelves, select books to read again, look through my journal of books that I've read, skim through the shelf of books that are waiting to be read, and re-arrange the mementos on the top of the shelves. I sit in the soft and cozy chairs that once were in my grandparents' enclosed porch, and I truly enjoy that room.

In the house I grew up in, I would go up to my third floor playroom and play library with my books, play teacher at my desk, play fashion designer with my dolls and their clothes, and wait till my father got home so we could play with the trains and make believe we were traveling out of Queens. ("All aboard for France!" my dad would say.)

When we moved out of that big old childhood home of mine, I missed the third floor of that house so much that it made me cry.

It has not escaped me that I've gotten back that third floor..... it's just bigger, in a bigger state, and it's filled with just books.  And I'm older. Oh well.

My dad would have loved the third floor of this big old house.