Things in Every Grandparent's House

A field survey of houses kept at 78 degrees that smell faintly of cedar.

Entries
10
Category
Stuff
Updated
  1. A narrow hallway wall covered in rows of small mismatched picture frames, all slightly crooked.

    10. A Hallway of School Photos

    Every grandchild's school portrait from kindergarten up, framed along the hallway, including the bowl cut year and the braces year. Nothing is ever taken down. It is the only place your worst haircut is displayed on purpose.

  2. A wall clock and a mantel clock in a dim, quiet living room, their hands showing slightly different times.

    09. A Very Loud Clock

    A wall clock whose tick can be heard from every room, plus a mantel clock that chimes the hour a few minutes off from the first one. Overnight guests learn to sleep through it by the third night, which is about when they leave.

  3. A bowl of wax fruit on a dining table, one apple with a small bite mark.

    08. A Bowl of Fake Fruit

    Wax or plastic grapes, a pear and a banana, arranged in a bowl on the dining table since before you were born. Roughly once a generation a small child bites the apple. The tooth marks are still there.

  4. An open refrigerator shelf stacked with mismatched plastic margarine tubs with no labels.

    07. Margarine Tubs Full of Leftovers

    There are no matching food containers, only rinsed margarine and whipped topping tubs, so opening the fridge for butter gets you last Tuesday's soup. Nothing is labeled. This is a household that runs on suspense.

  5. A crocheted granny-square blanket draped over the back of an old couch.

    06. A Crocheted Afghan on the Couch

    A granny-square blanket in orange, brown and avocado green, made by hand one winter in the seventies. It is too warm and slightly scratchy, and nobody would consider throwing it out. It will outlive the couch, and possibly you.

  6. A wall-mounted kitchen telephone with a very long coiled cord trailing across a linoleum floor, a handwritten list taped beside it.

    05. A Phone on the Kitchen Wall

    A wall-mounted phone with a coiled cord stretched long enough to reach the stove, the fridge and the back porch. It still works. Next to it is a handwritten list of numbers, half of them for people who moved away in the eighties.

  7. A floral sofa sealed in clear plastic covers in a formal living room with drawn curtains.

    04. Plastic Covers on the Good Sofa

    Clear vinyl slipcovers on the living room sofa, protecting it for an occasion that never arrives. The sofa is forty years old and looks new. In summer, standing up off it makes the sound of a bandage coming off a leg.

  8. A tall stack of small digest-size magazines on the back of a toilet tank beside a spare roll of toilet paper.

    03. A Stack of Reader's Digest

    DeWitt and Lila Wallace · 1922

    DeWitt and Lila Wallace launched it in 1922 in a basement under a Greenwich Village speakeasy, and it was America's best-selling consumer magazine until 2009. Grandparents still keep a stack by the toilet, which is where the joke pages were always read.

  9. A cut-glass candy dish full of hard candies in strawberry-patterned wrappers on a polished side table.

    02. A Candy Dish Nobody Remembers Filling

    A cut-glass dish of hard candies wrapped to look like strawberries, fused by humidity into a single large candy. A few are butterscotch. The dish is never seen being refilled and is never empty. Taking one requires prying, and is encouraged.

  10. A round cookie tin with its lid off, full of spools of thread, buttons and pins, on a lace doily.

    01. The Blue Cookie Tin Full of Sewing Supplies

    Royal Dansk · 1966

    Royal Dansk has made the blue tin in Denmark since 1966, with a farmhouse from the island of Funen on the lid. At a grandparent's house it holds thread, buttons and needles, and the company now counts that reuse as sustainability. Everyone opens it hoping for cookies. Once.

Honorable mentions

  • An open chest freezer packed with foil-wrapped bundles and frosted containers.

    A Freezer Full of Something Homemade

    Unlabeled foil packages in the chest freezer, each one soup, a casserole or a pie. They are thawed for visitors and beat anything from a restaurant. Identifying one in advance is not possible.

Dishonorable mentions

  • A dish of seashell-shaped soaps beside a bathroom sink with a fancy embroidered hand towel.

    Decorative Guest Soaps

    Small soaps shaped like seashells in a dish by the bathroom sink, too precious to use. Some have been there since the Carter administration. Guests rinse their hands with water and guilt, then dry them on a decorative towel that is also not for use.

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