Today’s memory challenge is about a place where many of us spend much time – the bedroom. In children’s books we often see a lot of scenes that take place in the main character’s bedroom so I thought I would try to recall all I could about any of the bedrooms I had as a child.

Nana’s house on Bonifacio Street. Over the various years I lived there I had every bedroom except the one belonging to my grandmother. The one I remember first is the one closest to the front street. My double-bed took up almost the entire room. The closet had a slanted ceiling with a bare light bulb and a pull string to turn it on. The windows were the old-fashioned kind (I don’t know what they’re called) that slide up. In the winter when they were wet they would stick. The screens were old ones with holes that let in the flies.

For a short time we moved out of my grandmother’s house and around the corner to Almond Ave. Again my bedroom was the one closest to the street. I don’t remember much about it except that it had hardwood floors and I would practice slide-skating in my stocking feet. It was also the only bedroom that I remember having nightmares in. My mom would tuck me in at night super tight, so tight that I feared being able to get out of bed in case of an emergency. There was a ceiling light fixture over my bed and I would worry about the monsters that lived in the roof coming down through that light fixture and attacking me in the middle of the night.

After that we moved back to my grandmother’s house and I moved upstairs to the attic which was my most favorite bedroom ever. I had the entire floor to myself with a bedroom that had a door to shut and an huge open area for play. It was hot as the dickens in the summertime (no air conditioning back then) but I could open the windows on each of the floor and the smell of the orange trees would fill the room. I didn’t have to keep the room clean because there was no chance of anyone, other than me, ever seeing it.

Next my mom decided we needed to be on our own again so we rented an apartment over on Meadow Lane. I was in high school, going to Ygnacio Valley for one year, and my bedroom was a constant, total mess. I had a purple fake fur bedspread, wax candles a boyfriend made for me, a turntable (you know, one of those old fashioned record players before CDs, before cassettes) and a earring holder I made for myself out of a sheet of burlap material. The holes in the burlap were perfect to slid the hooks of my earrings through. The entire apartment had yellow long shag carpet. I had a phone of my own in my room, with my own number, and my mom would call me from the phone in her room to say goodnight.

That apartment didn’t last long and we moved back into my grandmother’s house. This time I had the middle bedroom which, in retrospect, seems really weird because you couldn’t shut all the doors to have any privacy.  My room was the one you went through to get to my grandmother’s room. It also didn’t have a closet and I can’t remember where I kept my clothes. All I remember about that room was that I still had the purple fake fur bedspread and my piano was in the same room.

Your turn. What do you remember about the bedrooms of your childhood?