Some things are meant to be.

I have truly come to believe that things happen for a reason.  People come into your life to teach you, to enrich your experience on this earth, to make your days brighter or sometimes a lesson is learned through the pain of meeting the “wrong” person.  All of these things were meant to be; to happen, specifically to you.  The good, the bad and the ugly.  All are chances to learn and grow.  I have also had this experience with animals and even inanimate things.

I have already told you the story of how the house found me, and I do believe we were destined to have this house.  Despite all of the trials and trauma that has come along with it, it wanted to be ours…or maybe we were the only ones  who could handle it.

Through out the 15 years I have lived here, it has become more and more obvious that this place has a vibe all its own.  I’m not saying it’s haunted, because it’s not.  I mean that it has a way of getting what it wants.  For  example, my house is decorated in a 1940’s, retro, cottage style.  Honestly, when we moved in my decorating style was more of  primitive/colonial and I initially decorated with primitive pieces and paints.  But as time went on, I slowly noticed that I was drawn more to vintage 40’s pieces, colors, and cloths.  Yes, the furniture that was left here was of that era and we did use the ones that were in good enough shape to.  But, they were just pieces of furniture which really could’ve been adapted to any style.

I started to repaint rooms that I had previously painted using primitive colors and found the new colors I had chosen were very similar to the original paint that was under layers of paint.  I found an estate sale that was selling a 1940’s refrigerator, stove and sink and knew I HAD to have them.  I found a Hoosier,  in good shape, the same colors as my kitchen.  I found a clawfoor tub, and an enamel-topped table.  I was not searching these things out.  They found me.  And each time I could envision exactly where and how they would fit into the house we were so slowly fixing up.

Over the Thanksgiving weekend I decided to repaint my living room.  I had wallpapered it 11 years ago: a pretty, primitive star print on a crackle background.  Obviously, it didn’t really go with the rest of the house, but I was hesitant to change it because we need to gut all the plaster walls, insulate and sheet rock the whole room sometime in the future.  Well, after 11 years, a cat and a growing son, the wall paper had seen better days and was peeling.  So…I decided to paint over the wall paper, as a temporary band aid.

Ugh! What a disaster! Horse hair plaster walls, wavy, cracked and uneven by nature mixed with peeling wallpaper leads to uneven paint edges around trim, ceiling and floor.  It just about drove me mad, and almost lead to divorce…but, it’s done.  And it doesn’t look too bad.

So now I needed to hang some things on the walls, but everything I had taken down was primitive and too dark for the now, dark walls.  I remembered we had stored quite a few paintings that had been on the walls here when we moved in, in the attic.  I figured I would pull them out and see if there was anything I could use.

The bulk of the paintings were done by Mrs. Fisher’s sister, Dorothy Eaton.  A semi famous artist, her works show up from time to time in auctions and in galleries.  Born in 1893 and died in 1968, Dorothy was best known for land/cityscape, still life and figure painting.  She resided in Massachusetts.  I remembered some of the paintings, including three huge wall murals, and remembered thinking that they weren’t my taste.  But, needing something to hang on my living room walls I dug around to the back of the attic where I found them wrapped in an old blanket.

As we started to pull them out, I could see that they weren’t as bad as I remembered, and I was getting excited about where I could hang them.  One I was really drawn to was a still life of flowers in a soup tureen.  It was quite large, and was in a rectangular shape.  I instantly visualized it above the fire place.  Another interesting painting was one that had an inscription in the lower left corner that read; “Merry Christmas To Donald Fisher 1940”.  This one was also quite large, and had rich colors.

As we started to hang these special paintings I got a chill.  This is where they belonged.  They were meant to be here, at this time, in his room.  They were perfect.  Each time I enter the room I am taken aback by an overwhelming feeling of belonging.