Parlors by Fanny Fern

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 7, 1873

Parlors.

By Fanny Fern

ANY lady who wishes to have lace curtains before her parlor windows has my hearty leave to have them, provided she does not insist upon my following her example. I was once bitten with the same mania. I recollect the temptation came in the shape of an exquisite fern leaf pattern. So I bought them and hung them up, and everybody said, “What a pretty idea!” But every time I went near the window they were dragging across my hair or nose, and, worse still, interfering with my idolized plants. So I was not sorry when upon having them “done up,” to find they were done for, and had come to pieces. Since then, my ivies and geraniums and roses have had all the light and sunshine they wanted, and weave prettier curtains for me than any ambitious upholsterer could do.

“Dirty plants!” I think I hear some housekeeper exclaim—“dirty plants! spoiling the carpet, and always making a litter with dead leaves, and necessitating the great, blazing sun to stare unwinkingly in, whether one is looking becomingly or not.” As to the latter, cheerfulness and brightness seem to me the most potent of cosmetics, and a gracious welcome of more importance than the latest style of skirt, or hair, or trimming.

Sometimes I have gone into such hearse-like parlors that my very blood chilled at their uninviting upholstery stiffness. I would as lief sit down in a furniture shop, and a great deal rather, because that has its own honest designation. A “parlor” to me should speak of individuality. Because Mrs. Jones fancies great crockery vases as big as one of her children, must I buy a pair? Because she likes artificial roses on her mantle, may I not have instead a sweet tuberose stalk, with a bit of heliotrope and mignonette in my little vase?

Because her children may never enter the stiff, sacred parlor, with its stereotyped chairs and lounges, repeated in every house in the block, may not my pet's one-eyed doll lie on the sofa in mine if she chooses to “put it to sleep there;” and so make me glad that there's a little child in my house who is not banished to the nursery because my parlor is too fine? Because Mrs. Jones keeps her rooms so dark that you enter them with a dread of a broken ankle from some fatal misstep, may I not rejoice in the faded roses in the carpet under my feet where there are no such pitfalls for my guests?

I confess to liking a homely parlor—one that looks as if it were used; with a work basket here, and a book with a folder between the leaves there, and a shawl that somebody had on but a minute ago lying in a cosy corner of the sofa. I like chairs expressive of individuality, shaped to the backs of their users, from the good man of the house down to the little fairy's, which is sure to get a wicked little twist in its legs. Pictures of course, and an open fire, too, if it be winter. And oh, grant us pure ventilation! Oh, what a dead, used-up air sends you staggering back at some parlor thresholds! and how blissfully unconscious are its occupants of the reason why their cheeks are so flushed and their eyes so heavy! How you long to say, “Good friends, open a crack at the top of your window!” And how you don't, but sit there till you look as stupefied as themselves, and make your call as short as possible, that you may escape to the blessed, out-door air.

Statues are not to be despised in a parlor; but the hard working mechanic has as beautiful a statue as all your money could buy, when his little, curly-headed child climbs up in the chair at the window, “to watch for papa.” I like to see this bit of poetry woven into his hard life, when with his box of tools in his hands he passes the rich man going to a luxurious home. It is one of the poems I am fondest of reading, as I stroll along at the day's close.—Fanny Fern.