Office Decor

Here are a couple of things that I have in my office in Honors House.

I don't know where I got either of these pieces. The mirror is one of those two-sided jobs, one side of which is regular while the other is triple magnification. The little Lego man is from some set for building scenes from the ancient world, although he could be a character from a Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark Lego set. Come to think of it, that's probably more likely. Anyway, it's funny that when the little man is set on the mirror these two pieces are transformed into a single recognizable scene. You know what it is.

A few years ago, my mom began falling at home a lot. An obvious and serious problem. The house that she lives in is the house that she grew up in. It began as a two-room cabin and grew as my grandparents' family grew—and grew and grew. He and his first wife had two children in this house. When she died after the second child was born, he eventually married my grandmother and with her had nine more. I don't know how many of them lived in the house at the same time. Anyway, all this building on led to floors that were uneven. When we moved into the house in 1968, after my grandfather died, my dad tore up the floors and leveled them, which left lots of little unavoidable step-ups and step-downs between rooms. My brother and I realized that we needed to restrict Mom's circuit through the house to those areas that had the fewest and the smallest steps. This required moving her to a different bedroom and adding on a bathroom. This addition required taking part of the near-wrap-around porch, and one window looking from the living room onto the porch was a necessary casualty. For my 50^th birthday, my aunt Ernie (Ernestine) blew up one of my favorite pictures of the old homeplace and framed it with one of the porch windows that was removed. My wife found the tripod stand at a thrift store somewhere here in Johnson City.