Revisiting my Teen Bedroom

Please do not disturb

The idea for this post was originally sparked by a fellow Substack writer,

Lynda With a Why

. Her reflections on the juxtapositions of working from her suburban 1980s childhood bedroom last summer stayed with me. While kid memories of Lynda’s home remain watertight (right down to the mix tapes and never-comfortable single bed), things have changed. Like the house, and Lynda, her parents have predictably grown older as well. That same home of her youth has now been outfitted with powerlift recliner chairs to upright her dad from a seated position and toilet seat fittings to assist with the same. But it’s still the same house. Isn’t it?

Home is our foundation—but is it a person, a place or a thing? Is it where our parents are? Where they were? Where you once were, carefree and starry-eyed about the future? What memory remains undiluted? That of our childhood bedroom or the same bedroom decades later, seen with the patina of adulthood?

A pencil sketch of our house that I did in grade 10 (not by moonlight, as suggested by the thumbnail of a moon rising above our ranch).

A few years ago, on our way home from a camping escape on the edge of Lake Erie, I had the accidental opportunity to revisit my childhood home. My parents moved into the city of Brantford (and to another city three hours north) over 25 years ago. The silos and pig barns that were central to my grandparents farm remain as a landmark on the corner of Mt. Pleasant and Arthur Road. So does the signature scent of the pigs—no road sign was ever required to determine that we were almost home.

My mom designed our red brick ranch down the road from my grandparents’ farm. My dad tilled the overgrown field and two acre triangle of land split by the rail line which was waving distance to my great-grandmother who lived on the other side of the tracks. I think it was the only time my dad was ever behind the wheel of a tractor.

That acreage became the ultimate playground for my siblings and I. Clearly, I could combine my love of haute couture (look at that chunky necklace and those shutter shades) with natural pursuits like returning wayward painted turtles to the pond (see exhibit A, above).

We had a stand of pines to inch our way up (higher with each year of extra bravery and scars as proof). My parents planted dozens of trees over the years on our property, turning field into forest—the tamaracks and spruce trees now nearly swallow up our old house from view.

As Kim and I cut across Mount Pleasant towards Paris down the road I grew up on, I asked Kim to pull over so I could hop out and take a photo of my childhood house to send to my sister who hadn’t seen the property in years. The front door suddenly opened as I angled for a better shot from the end of the driveway.

“Why the *u*k are you taking pictures of my house?”

I was expecting a shotgun ending to my day but after yelling back that I was Larry and Sandra’s daughter and had grown up in the house the current owner backed down and waved me in. (He later sent me home with a 4-pack of beer, pint glasses and coasters. What luck that the ‘new’ house owner was one of the brewers behind Brewers Blackbird Brewery in nearby Ancaster, Ontario.)

I hesitated for a moment on the front step. Did I want to go in? Did I want to see the changes that had no doubt unfolded or keep my memories of our childhood home perfectly intact? “Come on in and take a look at what we’ve done!”

The kitchen was open concept, the carpet had been pulled up and hardwood laid. There were pot lights, white cabinetry and modernity at every turn. A deck extended off the back beyond the French doors. The tall pines were still there and in an instant I could sense our family’s daily movements and routines that space.

“Walk around, really! Sorry about the mess!”

I remarked at how much smaller everything seemed from my kid memory. It seemed like a longer sprint to beat Dax to the bathroom at the end of the hall. My original bedroom looked so miniature, like a dollhouse. For several years, Dax and I shared the room—temporarily in a Queen bed and then later in bunkbeds.

When my parents built a primary bed and bath addition in the nineties I moved into their former bedroom (due to royal lineage, as the oldest, I was next in line for the throne). My real estate nearly doubled and my teen bedroom became a true sanctuary.

We had rules of course—no posters pinned or taped to the walls. However, according to the photo above, it was free rein on dream catchers, masks and ebony carvings. To the left of the image you can see one yellow dangling leg. It belonged to my papier mâché octopus (below).

My mom did permit us to choose our paint colours and wallpaper so I chose the same grass cloth that we had in our living room and kept my teen crushes confined to the pages of Tiger Beat magazine. I knew River Phoenix would one day be mine, so I was okay with this. Instead I chose a forest wall mural and integrated a wasp nest (that had safely overwintered in our garage) and an actual floor-to-ceiling tree trunk that I added a songbird’s abandoned nest to. Another tree branch was wedged at the head of my bed and a toss-and-turn sleep sometimes ended in broken debris in my hair come morning.

At a garage sale, my mom picked up a plug-in fireplace—it simple stack of logs with a flickering neon orange glow. For authenticity, I surrounded the faux fire with actual rocks, like a firepit. Yes, on top of the carpet. I parked my mountain bike inside. Yes, on the carpet. To round-out the all-natural Zen theme I painstakingly affixed 1,000 glow-in-the-dark adhesive stars to my ceiling. I even pattered them to mimic the night sky in the northern hemisphere at 10 p.m. according to the star chart provided.

Oh yes, I was cooooool.

I think back to the soundtrack of that room, it was your typical teen foray into everything soul-searching and embarrassing. I was on the curve of loving Vanilla Ice and Tiffany but had been introduced to the cooler high school-based influences of friends who were into Hendrix, Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan and Neil Young. MuchMusic expanded my education as did summer camp and counselors who would strum out the Indigo Girls “Closer to Fine” around the (real) fire. My friend Toni introduced me to the likes of Patti Smith and experimental post punk Brit bands like The Raincoats (the photo above is one of Toni’s curated mix tapes).

The nerve centre of my teen bedroom was my waterbed. What a treat that was. There was great ease in making it—I opted for European-style with no top sheet, just a duvet. Dax had a waterbed too—I’m not sure why Kiley didn’t? It was a true oceanic experience. My parents had the fun of moving Dax’s waterbed during his transient university years a few times.

My shelves then are not that different from what I have in my current collections. Found feathers, turtle shells, animal bones, bird guides. Margaret Atwood novels. A copy of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines (both gifts from my grade 12 English teacher, Joan Hamlin, who insisted these were the books of my life’s curricula). There were sketchbooks. Jars containing bats and baby opossums in formaldehyde. Arrowheads. Cans of unopened Goombay Smash from our family trip to Bahamas.

Friends from Scarborough Visual Arts Camp at Camp Walden—-Tim is posing with my hamburger.

I also had a central design piece: a giant papier mâché hamburger that sat on top of my bookcase, a product of my time at art camp. It was bigger than a Ford F-150 snow tire and a top-secret for the one sachet of marijuana I ever had ‘on my person.’ I can’t even remember how that came about but I hid it between the foam layer of hamburger and tomato and lime green tissue paper lettuce. My mom found it years later as parents do. I’m sure she thought I was on the road to living in a VW van, selling papier mâché creations to finance my lifestyle.

You can stay in this VW van in PLaya Maderas, Nicaragua for $33 a night! Image (and awesome idea) credit: Airbnb

There were two windows that flooded in a warm bath of light and the sheer volume of spring peepers down at the pond even though my room was on the opposite side of the house. The birch branches in front of my windows waved like those inflatable tube men used to advertise big sales in parking lots. As the sun painted beams and shadows across my floor, Xanadu, our Benji lookalike, moved accordingly, like a cat.

I’d lay there too, in my too-big pair of cowboy boots that I bought at a thrift store called Asparagus. A stick of patchouli would be ashing everywhere but on the surface of the incense holder on the old oak desk that was part of my room’s package. I think the doorframe came after the desk so it had to stay put. Oh—and on the doorknob there were at least a dozen DO NOT DISTURB signs pilfered from hotel stays. If only I had this custom collection from the boutique 25Hours hotel in Zurich that Kim and I stayed at two years ago.

Ray Lynch’s Deep Breakfast techno remix of “Celestial Soda Pop” would be playing on my boombox at a dull roar. No doubt I was writing a tell-all letter to one of my art camp pen pals about my plans to go volunteer in the jungle or move to the west coast. I was never job-oriented, even back then. I was more focused on what I wanted to see and do than the “be” part.

And it happened just like that. I stepped into that old bedroom that was once so familiar and saw and felt it all again. Back then I was simply being me, dreaming of seeing and doing stuff and I still adhere to that by default—but without the plume of patchouli now. That shit smells like a root cellar!

Have you been back inside your childhood home? Do your parents still live in the same house you grew up in? What stands out in your teen bedroom memories? Do you think home is a person, place or thing? You can read Lynda with a Why’s spark post here—you should follow her too!