Way Down Upon the Swanee River*

I've been looking at real estate listings online and gawking at the way other people decorate. Someone posted a link to this house at my favorite forum, and it reminds me of my grandmothers' houses.

Nana's house looked exactly like that, every inch covered in fancy geegaws as "purty as dog doodoo in snow," as she once complimented a manicure I'd given her. She had huge collections of snowglobes and porcelain bells, among other things. She took art lessons and painted in oils and on china. She drove around the Gulf Coast gathering different colors of sand, which she layered in designs in jars and jugs. You'd think there wasn't room for one more objet d'art in her house, but you'd be wrong.

At Christmas, she unpacked and set out hundreds of St. Nickknacks she'd made over the years, like baby food jars filled with hard candy and made to look like Santa with cotton ball beards and felt hats and pompom noses and googly eyes. She even had felt outfits to dress candy canes in, so that they looked like elves and carousel horses. She was the Martha Stewart of kitsch.

Nana had beautiful handcarved South American dressers hidden in closets to make room for crappy matched sets of bedroom furniture, and her living room furniture got increasingly gimmicky as she aged, with heated massaging recliners and sofas with hidden cupholders and pull-down trays paired with chunky end tables my grandfather made with awkward middle school photos of all the grandchildren shellacked into the surface. Those end tables honestly looked worse than they sound, if you can imagine it.

Grandmother Read immortalized her grandchildren on tables too, but her pictures were just stuck under the glass. She must not have loved us as much. She also had framed paint-by-number pictures hanging in the dining room painted by some of the scuzzins, mostly of noble Indian chiefs, but most of her decorative impulses were expressed in the medium of crochet. She had a plastic Indian doll's face with a crocheted surround and yarn braids hanging over the can opener in her kitchen. One of the scuzzins stole it as we were packing Grandmother's house away, along with some crocheted bed dolls and rolls of toilet paper. Poor old scuzzin Libby was afraid we'd get all the good stuff, I guess.

My mom didn't become one of those old ladies who decorate. Maybe the gene skips a generation. Luckily, I have enough children to keep me busy in my old age and can while away the hours crocheting laptop cozies and making felt Christmas covers for their cellphones, if they don't push my wheelchair out into traffic.

*Far far away
That's where my heart is yearning ever
That's where the old folks stay