Museum Day

We took my parents to the Littleton Historical Museum.

R, Gammy, & Bam-Bam

The museum is a working farm, and also hosts exhibits. It houses artifacts from the Columbine shootings, which took place nearby.

I wasn't ready to look at them and then just move on into a regular day. I didn't have children when the shootings happened, and now I do. In the middle of a normal working day, you get the news that your child is dead. The killer is another child, a schoolmate. Maybe if I had been by myself, I would have looked more closely, and I intend to go back. I skimmed over it, I am ashamed to say, because I couldn't take it. I looked at a few photos and got a displaced and disturbing sense of things confined under glass and rearranged, that had been spontaneously placed at spots around the school. Teddy bears, plastic flowers.

My Dad was very moved by it. He started reading one letter addressed to the killers, thinking it would be an inspiring letter of forgiveness. It turned out to be an outpouring of vitriol that made him step back from the glass case in shock. He said he would never forget it. The exhibit is set up very intelligently. It asks the question, what should be preserved from tragedy, and how should it be presented?

Then you walk outside from that climate-controlled, under-glass room, where artifacts are preserved from a single day of horror that became a symbol for suburban disenfranchisement. Misery and murderous resentment, violence nurtured among the granite countertops and landscaped yards. You step outside, and there is life a hundred, a hundred and fifty, years ago. Palpable and accessible, if you stand in the fields and listen to the chickens and realize that the silence is absence of machines and traffic noise.

I wonder what it was about those farms that so moved me. I can't stop thinking about them. It might be the same old idea of prospect and refuge, what makes an appealing home, the question that made me start this blog. Inside the museum building, there was an exhibit of hooked rugs and photos and artifacts of Littleton history. A photo of workers in the early 1900s constructing wooden pipes, slab by wooden slab built up to a round shape, to move water. The amount of work to move water a few feet--staggering. But the workers looked happy and proud, straddling the pipe, their faces dirty and wet. Think of the feeling of accomplishment, for each foot of tube they laid.

There was a blown-up photo of a group of women and kids in 1903, splashing up to their knees in the Highline Canal. Maybe because the women were stripped to camisoles and petticoats, their wet hair tumbling around their faces, but they looked out at you, laughing, and any sense of "olden days" dropped away. Children splashed each other in the water and their faces were as vivid and modern as R's little school friends. I don't think I have ever seen a more lively historical photo.

The 1860s house was just a rough log cabin. Exactly what was needed to live, no more. But there was a small fenced-in yard with a well-kept garden, and the log gate opened with a welcoming creak.

There were neat rows of crockery, preserves and spices on the rough wooden shelves.
There was clean oilcloth on the table with friendly wooden chairs all around, a tidy garden, a sleeping loft up some steep and rickety stairs. The sleeping loft was the only thing that gave me an uneasy feeling. Dark, musty smelling, hairy woolen blankets on a bed that crouched in the dark. Dust motes floating past the tiny un-glassed windows carved into the logs. I thought of living in a place where animals and other people were threatening, and I would not feel safe trapped up those rickety stairs. The prospect was spectacular, but the imbalance between prospect and refuge was unsettling.

I can't forget the silence, the way the sky stretched out all around.

We definitely notice the sky more in this house than we did in our old crowded house in Denver. But standing in the middle of those animal paddocks and fields of crops on a cool June day--that is prospect. Prospect that comes with a price. Everything you see needs attention, and must be cared for with your own hands. Without your careful husbandry, your family would die. But think of the satisfaction, when you turn back and look out over your land as the sun goes down after a long day of work. Animals fed, crops tended.

Patient pregnant mare.

Those narrow wire-spring mattresses were probably as comfortable as they needed to be for people who slept the deep sleep of physical exhaustion.

By 1890, technology and the railroad had come to Colorado.

The 1890s house at the Littleton Museum is fascinating. There are houses of a similar vintage all over Denver, sturdy, filled with handmade details. Gracious and liveable. My mom liked that the 1890s house had a china cabinet with a few special things displayed behind glass. There was a flower garden surrounding the house, a comfortable kitchen with a big stove, a sunroom, a piano. We have been saving up for a piano for awhile now. The 1890s house is more civilized than ours. The china cabinet with treasures and curios reminded me of one of my favorite details in the Little House on the Prairie books when I was little, the Dresden china shepherdess that Ma carefully packed to take with her as they moved. The painted shepherdess sat on the mantel of every house they lived in, no matter how rough or wild the house and its surroundings.

Grapevines


1890s larder. William Morris wallpaper in the living room.

A very soft and civilized place to rest after a day of hard farm labor.

Looking out at the barn, from under the 1890s grape arbor.

Grand old tree.

Sun porch

The screen door off this sunporch had the most satisfying creak. The Grandma's house screen door creak, that was the most authentic detail in the whole farm.

Bedroom chair

R with her Dad and her Granddad.