Brick, and Iron and Charcoal Gray

I often dream of my grandmother's house.

Solid, immutable red brick and iron on the outside, charcoal gray and somber on the inside, a quiet and conservative house with huge, uncluttered rooms and walls devoid of pictures or decorations. The carpet was mostly gray wall to wall and the wallpaper was so plain as to be unnoticed. There were heavy lamps on small end tables, understated floral furniture with iron firmness in their pillows and arms and elegant but forbidding wood. No bookcases to gather dust, no array of family portraits on the stairway wall, no flowers or ivy to soften the harshness of each perfectly kept room. It was a serious house, a house that commanded you to be calm and quiet, never run or raise your voice. There was a museum quality to it that frightened even the everyday dust away.

I slept in the room at the top of the stairs, a wide open space with one dresser, two single beds on opposite sides of the room and a remarkably long and narrow wooden table with a single cast iron lamp in the center, carefully aligned in front of the two small windows. From the only other small window across the room, I could see light from the street lamps and knew that just across the street there was a house of color and happy disarray where my friend Iris and her family lived, a house where the television would play late into the night, a house where a child was encouraged to write and draw on the attic walls, where laundry gathered in a pile on the back stairs and a huge, shaggy dog slept on the elegant oriental carpets without fear of reprimand for shedding. Dogs were fine in the Nova Scotia house, but here, the mere thought of pet hair would make my grandmother wince. Meals were sometimes haphazard, there was always music, and if you left something out of place, it might stay that way. I thought of that house as I drifted off to sleep between cool, starched sheets with hospital corners in a house that was very nearly sterile in its feel. Sometimes, knowing Nana was safely positioned in front of Lawrence Welk, I would steal out of bed and creep into her dark bedroom, so very much like my own but for a tiny dressing table and bench covered in bright checked gingham, the only touch of color in a vast, echo-y chamber, the only room beside the kitchen that even suggested her presence. It was, I came to realize later, a house my grandfather had made - somber, respectful, polished but dull, almost Victorian in its sparsity, a proper house for a successful undertaker. You did not spill things here and you most certainly did not go to bed without a bath.

After his death, I thought there might be some redecoration, some brightness, some primary colors to replace the muted pastels. But my grandmother maintained the house just as it had always been, finding, I imagine, some comfort in familiar surroundings and the perpetual duskiness of drawn shades and heavy curtains. She was, at heart, a dedicated traditionlist, republican to her core and in many ways, devoted to all the devils she knew. I often suspected the old house knew it.