The wallpaper

Growing up I had a friend who lived out in the middle of nowhere in the most incredible OLD house. It was the most awesome house in the world to me. I thought it was huge. Apparently my friends parents got divorced and her mom got it in the settlement. It needed a ton of work, but none the less I loved it there.

I used to spend the night there alot. On one of these occasions, her parents had gone out with instructions to keep the woodstove filled. The living room or "parlor" as it was called had this huge grate in the middle of the floor for the heat to come up from the basement. It was so weird to me. Really weird.

We were goofing around for along time watching TV and crap like that when it started getting really cold in the house.

Crap, we forgot to load that stupid stove.

"I will run down and do it ", I cheerfully chirped. Everyone was afraid of the basement but me. It was one of those old really scary type basements, like the basement where Norman Bates put his mom, you know that type.

I ran down there, filled the stove way too full with whatever i could find and ran back upstairs.

A while later we could smell smoke. She ran in the living room and we could literally see flames coming up from the floor.

"Holy crap Anne, we are really in trouble now" she yelled to me.

We had no idea what to do.

Her sister ran into the kitchen and grabbed a pot of water and threw it down that big old grate to put out the flames.

"Whew, that was a close call"!!!

A few seconds later the room filled up with steam, you couldn't see in front of your face. We all went in the kitchen to get something to eat, it was late and we were hungry after a long night of doing nothing.

After we finished our fried onion sandwiches, we went in the living room to turn off the TV.

"Holy crap Anne, we are gonna be in sooooooooo much trouble!!!"

"What?"

"The steam from the woodstove has made all Mom's wallpaper peel off the walls."

I looked around the room. OH MY GOD.

The paper was all peeled off, sitting at the bottom of the room very neatly rolled down like someone rewound a movie of someone hanging wallpaper. The walls were bare.

"What should we do Annie?"
"That's a no brainer, just leave the lights off forever, they will never notice."

The next day it took a while but they finally noticed. I couldn't stop laughing. It really looked funny.

It was so funny, I wound up having to paste that darn wallpaper up, took us the whole Sunday, totally ruined the weekend.

Whenever I see someone hanging wallpaper I think of that old house and that crazy old wood stove.