Growing up we were a wallpaper family. My mother wallpapered and I'm fairly sure her mother wallpapered. I don't recall a room in our house without wallpaper- flowers in the kitchen, historical minutemen in the finished basement, ballerinas, hearts and flowers in the girls bedrooms, sport themes in my brother's basement bedroom, something fancy with stripes in the parlor and the list goes on and on. We'd spend hours pouring over the big wall paper books you borrowed from the store. Those books were better than a Sears catalog at Christmas. I would choose paper for each room in my imaginary house. We always has extra wallpaper hanging around and occasionally my mother would let me cover my text books in wallpaper instead of brown paper grocery bags. Man, I was so proud of those gaudy book covers!
As I was removing a hideous dark brown and silver flowered wall of wallpaper from our upstairs guest room, another wallpaper memory hit me. My parents were no fools, they enticed my young neighborhood friends into helping with a wallpaper removal project by dangling a forbidden treat before us- permission to write on the walls! Once the paper was removed there was always a lag before the new paper arrived and all the kids that helped were allowed to use the bare walls as a canvas for whatever our brains could come up with. This was long before computers and printers and an abundance of scrap paper. The walls were the ultimate sketch book! We'd put our thoughts, dreams, artwork, grievances & tic tack toe games on every possible surface and then eventually Mom would cover it over with paper, creating a time capsule just waiting to be discovered. As an adult, I was given glimpses into my pre-teen self when my parents redecorated various rooms.
Writing on the walls and flashy book covers. My paint paralysis makes complete sense to me now. Like my ancestors before me, I'm a wallpaper person!
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