I visited my aunt and uncle in Nashville this past weekend. Their house is in a historic district near the center of Nashville. They’ve lived at their house since I was a little girl and now they are moving on to a smaller more manageable place so I decided to visit for one last time. I’ve always loved everything about their house: the stained glass, the niche in the wall for the old timey phone, the weeping mortar and the gardens. I love how my aunt Sharon has decorated every inch of the house in lovely vintage decor:
She knows the history behind every piece, and every piece has a wonderful story to it. One of my most favorite things about the house, that can’t be moved, has always been the attic. The attic was where the housekeeper lived in the 1940’s with the original owners. It’s just been storage since then but the original claw foot tub is still there and remnants of old flooring. Windows in the eaves and tons of secret doors. So many imagined stories about this space. I had to take one last photo to remember it by:
I have a whole story swimming in my head about the housekeeper who might have lived in this wonderful space. It’s probably nothing close to reality, but it does make the space more magical. One time when I was visiting my aunt gave me a piece of wood from the attic that the original owner had once used as an easel. It’s covered in oil paint and lots of little square notches as if the artist had used a razor blade to cut out tiny windows into something. All of this just adds to the story:
I first remember hearing my aunt talk about the house when I was very little. I remember her telling me about the rounded door and the weeping mortar. She has a great way of telling stories about houses. The houses become characters in the story themselves.
For years my aunt has told me the story of her great aunt Ida’s home in Myers Park (Charlotte, NC). It stood at 300 Providence Road. It was torn down many years ago and replaced with a huge nursing home. Every time I have driven by that nursing home I’ve tried to imagine the large house that once sat there, but in the stories the house just seemed to big! This past year my aunt Sharon finally tracked down a photo of that old house in an old album. It’s exactly like I pictured it:
I just can’t believe that such a house was torn down. This is why I’m hoping someone will invent a time machine, just so I can go back and see it in person.
Your stories always resonate with me. 🙂 Growing up, we would show up at my great grandmother’s house and basically never leave the property for a whole week. We were never bored – home cooked meals, games and loads of places to explore. We had many great adventures in the upstairs lair. It included scary closets, a Juliet balcony that was unsafe and forbidden (but oh so tempting), an unused-forever-kitchen and a charming bathroom… with a claw foot tub. I now live within a mile of the old house. It’s been completely redone for a long time, but it still lives in my memory as the quintessential “old house”… just as it was. (Odd story. The upstairs was used as a boarding house during the lean years, and my dad found out that one of HIS relatives rented a room in the house before it belonged to my mother’s grandparents – crazy because his family was from Illinois and the house is in a small town in Texas!)
Ohhh…the memories of my own grandparent’s farmhouse this brings up! The back stairway, the root cellar nd cobwebby basement, where Grandpa kept the bottles of 7up! The attic, which I only went into once or twice, and that wonderful slamming screen door! In the “parlor” was a huge, leather sofa, and upstairs were the rooms that once belonged to my dad, and his three sisters, with a huge central room, where my cousins and siblings and I made way too much noise, said our parents in the living room below us! Thanks for sharing your aunt’s house with us, Ashley! (I lived in an old parsonage, as a child in a small town in Minnesota…it was, to my disappointment, torn down years ago. So sad…as I’d love to roam through it, again!).
Sounds like a very cool home, although I don’t know what weeping mortar is.
We just recently moved to Monroe to be near my daughter, SIL and 4 young grandkids. We live in the country so we sure able to spend most of the time driving in the country but there are so many new housing developments it makes me sad to see the farms disappearing. The traffic is crazy. I wish I knew what this area was like 25 or 50 years ago. We haven’t made it to uptown yet but lots if other areas. I love old houses and digging through attics!