“Don’t paint this door,” I told the foreman of the painting crew and, for good measure, attached a sticky note to it: “Please! Don’t Paint Door!”
So you can imagine my reaction a few workdays later upon seeing the door, pintles removed from its hinges, leaning against a wall and freshly painted white as a cumulus cloud. Thundering mad was I with “#$@&!” being my newspaper-friendly reaction.
There is a very good chance you have in your home a similarly prized door – or wall. Specifically, a Measuring Door or Measuring Wall where you mark the rising heights of your children.
The Measuring Wall when I was growing up was actually not in our home but in my great aunt’s kitchen. Her given name was Elizabeth, which became Libby, which to my dad was Aunt Libby, which when he was little came out Aunt Wibbie, which stuck and was what my three siblings and I called her.
We visited Wibbie a few times a year and always she would march us into her kitchen where, one by one, we pressed our backs against the floral wallpapered wall near the refrigerator, wallpaper that still chronicled the growth of the small boy who became our towering dad.
“Stand up tall,” Wibbie would say, herself short by any measure, her directive as unnecessary as telling a kid to “eat your ice cream” because kids always want to be as tall as possible when being measured. As we assumed the posture of Buckingham Palace guards, she would mark our new heights, and the date, in pencil, the point always newly sharpened.
Just as one piece of broken tile is not much to look at, one measuring mark is nothing special – but put many together and you have a beautiful mosaic. Alas, you cannot very well pack up and move a kitchen wall, so when Wibbie passed away our mosaic was surely peeled off or painted over by new homeowners.
You can, however, relocate a door quite easily. And so it is that The Measuring Door for my daughter and son moved with us to a new house during their mid-childhoods, their heights from toddlerhood until they stopped growing at ages 17 and 19, respectively, recorded like clockwork – or, rather, calendar-work – twice a year on their birthdays and half-birthdays, a time-lapse image of two human saplings becoming trees.
Indeed, the pencil markings echo a tree’s growth rings that are broadest near the center of the trunk because the early stage of life is when timber grows most rapidly. Similarly, the distance between growth markings on a Measuring Door or Wall are widest during teenage years.
A tree’s growth rings also tell the story of rain and sunshine with thicker rings, drought and hardship with thinner ones. Growth markings likewise tell this story: that the little brother passed his big sister in height when he was 14 and she was 17, thanks to his biggest one-year surge of five inches; that her biggest leap was at age 12; that she eventually reached 5-foot-10, in thick socks, while he continued to 6-barefooted-3.
When our Mona Lisa of a door was reinstalled you can understand my elation upon discovering that a mustache had not been painted on it after all. The painter instead had taken great care to create a fresh white perfect frame around the priceless pencil marks, marks that now include four-year-old granddaughter Maya and in short time will be joined by her sister, Auden, not yet a year old, and newborn cousin Amara.
Our Measuring Door has become a Family Tree.
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Essay copyrights Woody Woodburn
Woody writes a weekly column for The Ventura County Star and can be contacted at WoodyWriter@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram at @woodywoodburn. His SIGNED books are available at www.WoodyWoodburn.com.
