Bright colors and unexplored rooms...a great recipe for a child growing up.

The house I grew up in was nothing like this but I always wondered what it would be like to be able to live in a house like this as a child. Long hallways with rooms off to each side upstairs....some being used and some with mysteries on the other side of the door. Perhaps a room with old furniture used by the past owners...now covered with dusty bedsheets. Just a peek underneath would fuel thoughts of past playmates running and jumping on the oversized couch with tufted pleats and velvet like coverings.

Perhaps a room with a dark stairway on the back wall leading to a closed door...a door that hadn't been opened for years. A door leading to the attic. The room that dad might have told me never to go into. I would have been so curious to find out what was in that attic. Old trunks full of photographs and a yellow brown stained linen shirt with a stiff white collar and ebony cuff links with a white silhouette of a woman on them. An old rocking horse with a broken runner never to be repaired...why not repaired? Stacks of LIFE magazines with pictures of real Indians...One named Sitting Bull..it says he died this week...but that week was decades ago. This could have been a secret room to retreat to...a room that fuels the imaginations of children...probably attics like this have excited authors down through he centuries and were the basis of novels like "The Indian in the Cupboard".

I would love to return to childhood for just one chance to live in a house like this and dream.