The family room in this house is huge; it’s the size of the house minus the garage. It’s huge. I hardly ever go down there, except when I do laundry, and the laundry room is just a small part of all that space down there. I just never turn right at the bottom of the stairs; I always go straight to the laundry room.

That family room used to be USED. Every weekend, it was full of kids. Zappa and his friends pre-empted that big room almost every weekend. They came after school on Friday and stayed. And stayed. And stayed. We had three full-sized sofa beds down there, and every Friday night they were pulled out, ‘sheeted,’ and slept on by all kinds of kids. The surplus slept on the floor in sleeping bags.

I used to buy eight or ten boxes of cereal every week. Milk? At least six gallons. And I couldn’t have kids sleeping over at my house without me making “Mommy Doughnuts” for them all. When those kids (who now look amazingly grown up!) visit now, they still talk about homemade pizza. The sweeties. If they’d come over now, I’d make some for them.

The music was blasting. The tv was on, and recording, too. We kept our computer down there then, and all kinds of ‘stuff’ was going on with that. (It was before I became a computer-addicted nerd, myself; I had no idea what they were doing down there. I do now. Whew, I’m glad I didn’t know then!) We had bonfires in the woods. We had bottle rockets blasting off the deck. (the evidence is still there.) We had campouts. We had stargazing. We had spelunking. We had canoeing. We had rafting. You name it, we had it. Or its aftermath.

Spelunking clothes have to go through the machine two or three times.

“Hey Mom, would you make pizza for us?” “Hey Mom, would you make chili for us?” “Hey Mom, could you drive us to Leatherwood Creek?” “Hey Mom. . . . .”

I miss that so much.

At the time, my head would ring from all the requests. Was there no rest for me on weekends?

Hah. Now I have restful weekends and few requests and I’m close to certified crazy from it. I miss it. I want it back.

This is why I borrow other people’s kids whenever I get the opportunity. I hate peace and quiet. I hate resting. I hate it when there’s no crowd to cook for. I want noise. I want demands.

Just not too many; I’m old now.

If I could go back in time, I’d go back to that period when the kids were in high school and the family room downstairs RANG with noise. It was the best kind of noise: laughter and music and the voices of young people having fun.

Occasionally we would have to forcibly evict someone. That always made me feel bad, but we did have a (very) few rules and one of them was no opposite sex after ten on a school night, or after midnight on a weekend. Zappa and his friends tried me with that one but they lost. You wouldn’t BELIEVE how ‘forward’ some of those girls were! There was one, in particular, I had to almost bully out of the house. Physically.

I also had to phone some moms and ask them to come and get their sons after five or six nights at my house. If they were going to stay that long, I wanted legal custody.

Sometimes those mothers hadn’t even know where their sons were. I can not imagine that. I should have just kept their sons forever, and adopted them. It’s possible that some of those mothers wouldn’t have even known. Or cared. I wish I’d paid closer attention to some of those boys. Because, you know, I really would have kept them forever. . . . .

And now they’re all grown up. Some are in the military. Some have families of their own. Some, like Zappa, are still in school. I miss them all.

When Belle and her friends took over the family room, the noise was different. Just as loud, but different. More on that later.

Cuz right now, I’m lost in memory of those boys, and their appetites, and their general silliness.

That room is seldom used now. Hub sits down there and watches tv while he grades math tests, but I never go in there. For one thing, I don’t watch tv. For another, all my old classroom stuff is piled up in one corner.

The main reason, though, is that it makes me sad now. It’s quiet in there.

This house is too quiet. I hate that. Maybe that’s why I turn the music up so LOUD when I’m alone.

That, and being an aging hippie.

Update: Yes, sometimes it WAS hard. Hub, especially, resented the loss of privacy. It didn’t bother me all that much as I grew up with no privacy, but he was an only child and really likes to crawl back in a cave once in a while. I don’t. I like the noise. I like people. But even if I didn’t, I would still rather be the mom giving the slumber party than the mom getting the phone call. Or worse: no phone call.

And please go visit the Carnival of Education!!!! It’s like voting: if you don’t do it, you’ve got no right to whine, later.