but...a bathroom very similar to this one once woke me up to the fact that rich people were different from us, us being my family back in the late 1950s.
I know, F. Scott Fitzgerald said it a lot better.
Only one more picture comes with this post but there is a story I want to put down for posterity because my three sisters were younger than me and I'm not sure how much they remember about that magical day.
When vacationing in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, our family was invited to a cookout at the house of a man Daddy bought apples from for all the middle Tennessee Kroger stores.
Col. B and his wife and teenage daughter (my age) lived in a very large house in a remote area near the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, near the French Broad and Pigeon Rivers.
Our house tour through the mansion could have been so intimidating except for the genuine hospitality Col. and Mrs. B extended all of us.
I hope we made Daddy and Mama proud of our behavior but I suspect that I walked through the house with my mouth wide open in astonishment. I remember the house as being a brick Southern Colonial but it was the interior that wowed me.
We entered the foyer walking across a rug that Daddy had already told us cost more than our house. And we weren't even asked to take off our shoes.
I don't remember the living room, maybe we weren't invited in there, but the family room had a feature that even I could see Col. B was proud of. He told us that when he bought the house, a large bar took up one whole side of the room. His kids wanted him to put in a drugstore soda fountain but instead he had a family altar built for their family devotions.
Then we went upstairs to see some of the bedrooms and I don't remember a single detail because I think that the teenage daughter's en suite bathroom wiped out any lesser details.
It was a pink marble bathroom. Not pink marble floor, pink marble bathroom, I mean from head to toe. All her very own. For ages afterwards I wished I had asked this girl who was my own age some questions--like, "Do you have any idea how lucky you are?"
But I didn't say a word, just listened to Mama talking to Mrs. B about the details, mortified because she told Mrs. B that I had a bathroom to myself too. And I did, it had a toilet and sink and window and it was pink. And you could have fit the whole room into the B's daughter's pink marble bathtub, easily. (Teenage daughters are mortified far too easily.)
But we still haven't come to the one item that impressed me more than anything, although I admit I was a little bit amazed that the large kitchen had a real water fountain in it near the service door. That seemed like true luxury to me.
I wish so much that I had paid more attention to the whole kitchen but we were on our way outside to the pool, where we'd been invited to swim and eat supper.
Yes, the large pool impressed me and the gorgeous terrace around it and the pool house where we changed into our swimsuits. And the outdoor kitchen (the first I'd ever seen if you didn't count my father's outdoor grill) where Col. B put hamburgers on to grill after we had all had our fill of swimming.
We lined up for our burgers, assembling them from all the condiments laid out for our choosing. And then came the luxury item that impressed me more than anything I'd yet seen. Mrs. B took the finished hamburger off my plate and put it inside a machine, lowered the lid, opened it to a whoosh and hot steam came out.
This made the burger taste like an honest-to-God drugstore hamburger, something I've always been very fond of.
Here's what it looked like, only rounder, more old-fashioned, just like the 1950s were.
Can you believe the beauty above is on sale for almost $1300?
I'm a simple woman. I don't need a pink marble bathroom.
And I definitely don't need a huge house to keep clean,
A pool would be nice, if I didn't have to maintain it, but what I really want is a bun steamer to make my hamburgers taste like the best drugstore hamburger ever.
Now that would be my dream house!
