Decorating a Room of One's Own by Susan Harlan

Author:Susan Harlan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2018-10-09T16:00:00+00:00

For anyone who has ever wanted to get away from it all, a Kansas prairie farmhouse is just the ticket. Dorothy is fortunate to live in the midst of these great prairies with her hardworking, silent farmer uncle and his equally somber wife. The one-room house has an almost prefab minimalism to it, with its four walls, floor, and roof. This all-purpose room contains a rusty-looking cooking stove, a cupboard for dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em have a big bed in one corner and Dorothy a little bed in another corner.

“It’s like a studio apartment, but you have two sad and life-wearied roommates, and you live in the middle of nowhere,” says Dorothy.

The property also has some sheds where the cows and horses are kept, but they are just normal cows and horses and not Kalidahs, which have bodies like bears and heads like tigers and are not a thing in Kansas.

Location is everything when constructing a farmhouse, and the flatness and grayness of the Kansas prairie ideally complement the house’s simplicity. When Dorothy stands in the doorway and looks around, she can see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house breaks the broad sweep of flat country that reaches to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun has baked the ploughed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass is not green, for the sun has burned the tops of the long blades until they are the same gray color to be seen everywhere. So that’s the deal with prairies.

Uncle Henry and Aunt Em also found inspiration in the prairie’s grayness when selecting the exterior paint. They wanted a color that would be blistered by the sun and washed away by the rain, as that is what happens in Kansas.

“Now the color is as dull and gray as everything else,” says Dorothy. “They probably should have gone with a durable, all-weather laminate siding. But, you know, hindsight and twenty-twenty and all that.”

There is no garret at all, and no cellar, but the house does boast a small hole, dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family can go in case a great whirlwind arises, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. The cyclone cellar is reached by a trapdoor in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder leads down into the small, dark space.

“Cyclone cellars are the sort of thing preppers are into,” says Dorothy. “They stockpile water, canned food, generators, flashlights, and stuff like that for when the apocalypse happens. But that’s not the way we think about it. I’m not convinced the apocalypse is coming. Aunt Em and Uncle Henry say that life is just steady, unchanging, and routine and stretches out for miles and miles until the end.”

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