LETTERS: OLDER HOUSE HAS ALL THE ESSENTIALS OF A GOOD HOME

To the editor:

When our minister son and his family moved from the parsonage in St. Peters, Mo., to a second in Fayette, Mo., he exchanged a nearly new house for one 70 years old. The newer house was solid, but the older is elegant in a manner that the new one can never be. Perhaps I am fond of it because it is so much like the house where I was born near Fortuna, Mo. The rooms are spacious, the hallways wide, the ceilings high. Tough varnished yellow pine trim is as good as the day it was installed. Windows have been updated. The old sash cords and weights are gone.

And, wonder of wonders, the house has two stairways, which require a certain reorientation. When we sat in the spacious kitchen eating breakfast, Rhonda, Kris' mother, suddenly appeared from a hidden door. She had come down by a secret stairway.

I cannot take seriously a house that has no upstairs, that requires me to have my dreams on the same level as the mailbox and the street sweeper. To climb the stairway is to go from dusk to night. Halfway up one can pause and look through the diagonal window with bubble glass into the tall lilac bush, perhaps a glimpse of Daniel's neighbor as he passes noiselessly in his electric golf cart.

A full attic is reached by a solid stairway. There's plenty of room for yellow papers of John W. Pershing, the cylinder gramophone and a recording of "Three O'clock in the Morning." It's a nice house with lots of room for yesterday and enough for today as well.

PETER HILTY

Cape Girardeau