The Room that Dad Built

The way I remember it, my father and his brother cut the boards themselves. In the garage behind the house, with the door wide open to the dark November morning, they lay the wood on the sawhorses and cut me a new room. My brother watched them as they ran the power saws until sweat froze to their foreheads. I came by and helped them pile up the planks, but soon my hands froze and I walked back to the house. The boards piled as high as my chin.

Maybe I don't remember it correctly. My father might have picked the planks up at the Somerville Lumber outlet and lugged the wood home in his pickup. He could have been sanding them down in the garage for all I know. It took him forever to refurbish and nail the planks into the walls of our cold spare room. But after a year and a half, for my 12th Christmas, my parents gave me a new bedroom, a brand-new, wood-paneled room with a skylight and electric heating and wall-to-wall carpeting.

Our house is ancient, and has traveled. It arrived at its present spot in the 1850s, when a farmer moved it from the garden of one of the town's most lavish estates into his apple orchard. The five-room house had belonged to the estate's gardener. That apple farmer and his family put the house on logs and rolled the house a half-mile across town and onto a foundation they had dug themselves. I discovered this history when my father first took a whack at the white plasterboard of the spare room. My father slammed the hammer's teeth into the wall, peeling away the flimsy board to reveal dark, cobwebbed wood.

Newspapers had been stuck into corners to keep out the wind, but were too old and brittle to read. But what amazed my father most were the beams he found above our heads. The room, he said, had an old-fashioned cathedral ceiling. Where the old beams crossed, someone had driven a short, wooden post to hold them together. There was not one nail in may room. When the first gardener and his family moved into my house, there were no such things as nails.

This awed my father, who doesn't get awed by much He climbed onto a stool and examined the post. I suppose he tried to figure out how it had been hammered in, whether it had strained over the years, whether it had grown brittle--he didn't say what he was thinking.

Last summer I showed him pictures of a trip to London, a city he had once visited on military duty when he was my age. He nodded at just about everything I showed him, remembering old back cabs, the alter of St. Paul's, the Tower Bridge. He stopped, though, over a picture of a ceiling--the arches of the Chapter House in Westminster Abbey. He tapped it and said quietly, "They knew how to do it then, didn't they."

It took me some time to make the room my own. I had shared one room with my brother since he was born four years after me and I was ready to stake out my own space to fit my preadolescent needs. I had mapped out the spare room since I was 11. I presented my parents with color-coded floor plans indicating the exact location for the television, stereo, private bathroom, and four-poster bed in the 15-by-10-foot room. By the time the room was ready, my father and uncles discovered that the room was too small and cluttered to accomodate a door.

My mother decorated the room in green--a light green carpet, a dark green bedspread. The walls are the unfinished softwood planks my father cut for me; his brother put the sockets in. They cut a hole in the old wood and built me a skylight. They took down the venetian blinds and put up modern Levelors.

The marks of my adolescence remain--hand-made calendars marked off in Latin, New Yorker covers I pinned up during my pretentious sophomore year of high school, a hex circle bought on an eighth-grade trip to Amish Country. The smells are the same, somehow--deodorant I used senior year, the wet leaves on the trees by the skylight, the old books I had collected since seventh grade.

These, I suppose, are the assurances of anyone lucky enough to have a space left over from childhood. It is something to have your inner life take space, to have adolescence leave its varied marks on your walls. To enter the room is to enter the only place I've built myself, a room under my father's skylight and an old farmer's wooden post.