Girl Stuff

The truth is, my daughter's bedroom is usually messier than her brothers' room. She used to insist that she preferred it that way.

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Nonetheless, when she went to work cleaning her room on Tuesday, she managed to accomplish the task in just one day, with very little help from me.

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Here she is reorganizing her desk.

Are you ready for today's tour? This is the view of Sarah's bedroom from the hall.

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The screen on that window is shredded, I'm not sure why. We had it repaired once, but it was soon in tatters again. Luckily she has another window she can open without inviting in all the insects in town!
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Isn't it funny how you can immediately tell a girl's room from a boy's room just by standing in the doorway? It's not that her furnishings are fancier or that her decorations are frou-frou. It's that her memorabilia simply evokes a girl's tales and feminine vibes.

Were your walls and mirrors plastered with your latest teen heart-throb? Mine were. For years it was wall-to-wall Monkees and especially Davy Jones. Then it was the Osmond Brothers.

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Like mother, like daughter. First Sarah adored Justin Timberlake of N'Sync, until he shaved his head and started dating Britney Spears, a total turn-off for Sarah.

Then it was Daniel Radcliffe, who portrays Harry Potter in the films, until he took up smoking and appearing nude onstage. Harry Potter is still in; Radcliffe is out!

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Now her HOTTIE list includes:

David Archuleta, the young LDS vocalist of American Idol fame;

Robert Pattinson, who portrays brooding vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight films

(but I still say werewolf Jacob Black is hotter!);

Matt Dallas, who is Kyle of the TV series Kyle XY; and

Zac Efron who portrays Troy in High School Musical.

The classic hope chest on the right used to belong to Sarah's great-great-grandma Helen Marie Moser Carter.

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The dresser and mirror were given to my mom when she was a little girl, from her sister Eva, who was 13 years older than my mom.

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My parents refurbished the dresser and handed it down to me when I was about 10.

We repainted and passed it on to Sarah when she was 3, when we bought this house.

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Throughout my teenage years, those same old mirrors were covered with pictures from Tiger Beat, photos of my friends, and inspirational messages. I even taped to it 5 four-leaf clovers that I'd found!

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See any similarities here?

Sarah has followed suit in surrounding herself with memories of people and things that are important to her.

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She says graduating from high school was a bigger shock than she'd expected. Getting together with the busy friends she once saw in classes daily now requires a lot of planning and synchronization of schedules.

At heart, Sarah is a packrat. When we were dusting these shelves, she looked at a ceramic piece and said, "That's so ugly." "Then why are you keeping it?" I asked. "I made it in 2nd grade," she explained. I convinced her she should only keep things if she enjoys them, so she tossed it.

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There are so many objects on these shelves, with so many stories and memories attached to each one. It would take pages to describe each giver, each occasion, each meaning.

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Nice furniture makes a house pleasant, but I believe it is these small things, the memories of love that surround us, that truly make a house a home.