When I was a boy, my room was roughly 9 feet square. That seems small now, but I hardly noticed at the time. It was pine paneled in that 50's style of rippled boards and had an oak floor. The pine panelling had a certain appeal. Right over my bed was a place where the knot holes came together from several board to make a gorilla face with two arms raised in a scarey way. He didn't scare me, but I always saw him there. Our house was a 1200 square foot, two-bedroom home with a bath and a half and it had a den. My dad bought it in 1956 with a Veterans Administration loan, a benefit of his service in World War II and he lived there about 40 years before moving to warmer climes in south Georgia. The den was my room for most of my years from age 5 to 21, when I married and moved away. My mother asked me how I wanted it decorated and then made me red curtains that shut out all the light from my big window that looked into the backyard. I also had a red bedspread and a blanket with deer on it across the foot of the bed at times. I had a black and white metal desk with a map of the United States on the desk top, and we painted my chest of drawers white with black drawers to match. So it looked like a boy's room. At 8:00 on Sunday mornings the door would open slightly to my room and Mama would tug at the foot of my bed clothes and say "Time to get up." Breakfast was making in the kitchen and it didn't take much prodding to be roused for bacon, eggs, toast, grits, and a glass of milk or orange juice. There was the smell of coffee too, for the adults. My room had a walk-in closet. It seemed huge and held all my clothes and extra clothes, coats and things that belonged to others. On it's big shelves up above the fat wooden dowels that held my hang up clothes, my nice pants and my button shirts and my brown plaid sport coat for Sunday morning, my ties, and later the gray suit that I wore to college, all manner of things were stored. Suitcases, boxes of mother's things. Below on one side my father had built some shelves that held my games and books, ball glove and bat, and a football. On the floor on the other side was a green metal trunk which had a tray in the top for small things, like decks of cards (my mother went against the Baptists there and let us play card games), sea shells, old coins (a 1914 s penny that Uncle Will gave me and a couple of silver dollars that I got at Aunt Margaret's that had eagles on them, one from 1888, the year my grandfather Charlie and grandmother Cora were both born). I wonder when my great-grandfather Marion was born-- before or after the war? Did my great-great-grandfather serve in the war? He is unknown to me. Underneath the tray the trunk served as my toy chest. Army men of many varieties, a complete civil war set that came from the Sears and Roebuck catalog, and the wooden fort that my dad built for me to play with them. I had so many men and accompanying fortifications that they covered the entire living room floor on some afternoons. I thought I had a lot of men but one day I got challenged by the older boy across the street, Winky Wells (who drove a 1936 Ford Coupe, bright blue and very cool), to a pitched battle in his back yard. I put everyone out there together, even the old cowboys and Indians, all fighting on the same side, but Chuck and Winky easily had four times as many men as me, and in the dirt clod bombing that took place later, my men were routed while he had hundreds still standing. That room was warm. It was right over the furnace and had the short run of pipe into the vent under my window. Everyone used to come to my room to get warm. I've been cold ever since leaving that room and I'm still cold today. Thank goodness for longjohns in winter time.