The Sunroom

Off my parents' bedroom on Llewellyn was a tiny hall that led to a closet area on one side, and to a sunroom which was over our front porch.  This room was unheated and in terrible condition, unused and served merely as storage area.  One summer I had the brilliant idea of turning it into a bedroom!  Tired and fed up with the third floor girls' dormitory, I coerced my younger sister into begging my parents to let us fix it up and use it for the summer.  My mother, distracted with the every day needs of managing ten children, blew us off by saying if we cleaned it up, we could use it.  The next week was Homeric in our resolve to change it into a viable living quarter.

We dragged everything out, cleaned it all up, washed and waxed the wooden floor, somehow managed to find two twin beds, and triumphantly displayed our work to my mother.  She agreed we had kept our end of the bargain and let us use it as a bedroom!  We were allowed to move to the sunroom for the summer.

Sleeping there, with the windows open (they were on all three sides, half way up and could be latched to the ceiling) and trees surrounding it, was an experience I will never forget.  We woke to the sun shining in the windows, the breeze wafting over and around us - it was as if we were in a tree house shut off from everything and in our own little world!

Once summer was over and the cold weather came, our sunroom bedroom turned back into a storage area and my sister and I went back to the third floor.  My recollection is we never used the sunroom as a bedroom again - it didn't matter - we had a dream and we made it happen!