Hello. Hello. it’s that time of the year when I’m in the mood to slam the front door behind myself, and roam the wild world for stimulating experiences.

Library? No. Too claustrophobic. Tired eyes require a wider horizon. Art museum? No. Too quiet. Too intense. Too reverent of beauty on a sunny summer day. Zoo? No. I was there just last week.

Where? Where? Where?

Hum dee dum de dum, I think as I drum my fingers against my brain. And then ... a thought!

A house tour! Some place old. Someplace intimate. Someplace not too grand. Not too small. An edifice where real people once dwelled. Preserved as it was when they lived there. Windows open. Fresh air. Evocative artifacts. A good natured, informative tour guide.

Oh, joy! And I know just the place.

My friend Claudia said, “I’ve always wanted to tour N.C. Wyeth’s house and studio.”

Really? I asked when she was overworked and her defenses were down.

Really! She responded. And so. We went. And it was just … grand.

First, in case you forgot or never knew who N. C. Wyeth was (born in 1882), I’ll give you a keyhole introduction: He was an artist in the Golden Age of American Illustration, the prime mover of which was Howard Pyle. N. C. became one of Pyle’s students, and with the sale of his first painting to the Saturday Evening Post in 1902 until when he died after his car was hit by a railroad train in 1945, he was marvelously successful.

What a career! What a family! What a life! N. C. and his wife Carolyn had five children. Nataniel was an inventor. Henriette, Carolyn, and Andrew were painters. And Anne was a musician and composer. N. C.’s youngest child, Andrew Wyeth, was the one most people remember. His grandson, also a famous painter, is Jamie Wyeth.

I mention this only because I was going on a tour of N. C. Wyeth’s home and studio, where all of his offspring had lived, learned, and frolicked during the formative years of their lives. Both buildings were imbued with their spirits, souls, ghosts … what have you. Happy-seeming ghosts, I might add.

For me, the highlight of our adventure was N. C.’s studio, as the minute I entered, everything from the dust, to the age-blotched walls, to the vast, gorgeous windows that let in a tsunami of sunlight, to the picture frames, muskets, scythes, and paintings hanging on the walls, to the giant easel exhibiting a still life of bottles, to the shelves displaying model boats, busts, books, a canoe, a candelabra, to N. C.’s old paint-spattered smock, to the table on which his palette and brushes have remained, untouched since the day that he died … it was all so marvelously evocative, I felt as if I had been transported to an atelier in bohemian Paris circa 1850.

But what really set my imagination going was the house itself, which N.C. built in 1911, and which his family occupied until 1994, when his daughter Carolyn died, and it became a museum.

It is so warm, and homey, and inviting, I can guarantee that the minute you walk through the door, you will say to yourself, as Claudia and I did: “I could live here.” I won’t go into detail about the sit-in-able sofas and chairs, lush carpets, bust of Beethoven, Anne’s beautiful grand piano, the gorgeous woodwork, the paintings on the walls, the fire places, or the custom furniture.

Go see for yourself. Because what really, truly, and absolutely enchanted me more than anything was a plain room about the size of a pantry containing a chair, a table, and an old-fashioned phone.

The telephone room!

And that instantly kicked my mind back to the wonderful Tudor house where I grew up, with its five bedrooms, five bathrooms, the little cubbyhole in the wall from the kitchen to outside the backdoor, where the milkman delivered our butter and eggs. And right beside that … our telephone closet.

Mom had put a folding chair inside, where we could sit surrounded by overcoats, sweaters, raincoats, hats, and umbrellas. To the left was a small shelf, and on top of that, our clunky, black dial telephone. Above the phone was a once-blank-wall, graffitied (was there space for even one more letter or digit?) with names and telephone numbers. We lived in fear that in a moment of annoyance, our mother would view that wall with disgust, take out a sponge and some Pine-Sol, and erase our social lives. But she never did.

Oh, gosh. What memories!

Now, this is where I fly off the rails. Because the N. C. Wyeth house did not have the object that popped into my mind the instant I saw the telephone room. But it should have.

To what, you are wondering, am I referring? Well … to the marks my father made on the door jamb of the telephone closet when we were children, holding a yardstick in one hand, a pen in the other, and measuring how tall we had grown.

“Stand up straight. Don’t’ slouch. Press the back of your head against the door jamb. Now … don’t move.”

I wonder, do contemporary parents still do that? If they don’t … they should. Because one’s growth being measured by Mom or Dad is a rite of passage. Like the first time a boy shaves, or the first time a girl wears lipstick.

And that brings me back to N. C. Wyeth’s telephone room. Do you wonder if it, too, had phone numbers scribbled on the walls? Or if the heights of his growing children were written on its door frame?

It did not when I saw it. Clean walls. Clean door jambs.

All of which goes to show you that art, museums, monuments, exhibitions, and the like, sometimes exist not just for us to react to what is THERE, but also for what is there to elicit memories. Or, perhaps, even to stimulate creativity.

Which happened to me, because my tour of N. C. Wyeth’s home inspired a poem. I know. I know. The poem should be about the telephone room itself. But my brain played a trick on me. So instead, it is about numbers written on a door jamb from my far away past.

I wonder. Did you father ever measure your height against a door jamb, too?

Scribble Scribble on the Wall,

Are you short or are you tall?

Where’s my ruler and my pen?

Time to gauge your height again!

Come on, Kids. Up off the floor.

March yourselves unto this door.

Sammy, Jordan, Mike, and Pam.

Shoulders back … against the jamb.

Stand still, children. Please don’t flinch.

Oh, my God. Pam’s grown an inch.

Mike and Sammy, this won’t hurt.

Well-done boys! A real grown spurt.

Jordan hasn’t grown, I see.

Taller, though, than Mom or me.

No more measurements today.

I’ll put my put rod and pen away.

‘Til in time, another poem

Will document how much you’ve grown.


Copyright © Shelly Reuben, 2026. Shelly Reuben’s books have been nominated for Edgar, Prometheus, and Falcon awards. For more about her writing, visit www.shellyreuben.com