One of the things I love about my house is finally having a place for everything. Let’s be clear: rarely is everything in its place. But oh, the potential of it all. Everywhere I turn there are cabinets and closets and shelves. And an attic! And a basement that’s not even scary! No more having furniture stored in relatives’ houses. My bike is no longer considered living room seating.

The 40-something woman who waited a long time for a house? She’s downright giddy. But the beauty of years of apartment living is that it never took me too far away from the childhood home where I got my start.

Move over…or up, or down, or somewhere.

I grew up in what was quite possibly the smallest house in southeastern Pennsylvania. The house was so small that we actually considered the one and only hallway a room. It even had a name – the middle room. “Where are the kids? Playing in the middle room.” And I was fortunate. I was born post-addition, which bumped the house from a square to something akin to the length of the indoor pool at the Y – but not as wide.

I’m not quite sure how my parents and two older brothers survived the stinky teen-boy years relatively unscathed (and by that, I mean my brothers are still alive), particularly in light of the fact that the boys’ bedroom was adjacent to the living room. As in, you walked through the front door into the living room, and then straight into their bedroom. The trip took about 10 steps as the crow flies.

The bedroom was resplendent in red and blue bedspreads covered with giant white stars. They were nicely complemented by the Bicentennial gilded eagle mirror that hung on a little strip of wall outside their room, precisely two steps from the kitchen. You could sit at the kitchen table, look in the mirror, and see who was walking in the front door. God bless America.

Can we talk about this when I have pants on?

If the house was small, the bathroom was miniature. Like, legendarily miniature. Two particularly tall friends from college – a long, lanky cross-country runner and the captain of the women’s basketball team – barely survived their visits to my bathroom. I still feel badly about their adult-onset claustrophobia.

Everything in the bathroom was 1950s blue. The toilet, the tub, the sink, alternating tiles on the floor and the walls. Other children anticipated Christmas for the presents – I was happy simply to have a red and green toilet seat cover, the red Santa “good” soaps, and the “it’s just for decoration” toilet paper with the little red Santas all over it.

When you sat on the commode, you could simultaneously bang your knees against the underside of the sink, clean the shower-door track with a Q-tip, reach up with your other hand and open the medicine cabinet, and rest your head on the wall. (After some nights out in my 20s, that was actually a welcome feature.)

But my very most favorite feature of the bathroom was the window. For despite its dollhouse proportions, the bathroom had a full-size window – in the shower. A window that my mother would use all summer to monitor the exact moment I turned on the shower, and then decide she absolutely had to speak with me at precisely that moment. Common topics included my schedule, my chores, what time I needed the car for work, how the lawn-mowing was progressing, and what the kids (at this point, my tiny nieces and nephews were underfoot most of the time) were up to outside. If the neighbors were out of earshot, sometimes I would get a play-by-play of what their weird kid was doing. Like the time it was so hot he filled the trash can with water and climbed in.

 I haven’t read the newspaper – is the laundry done?

Our eat-in kitchen took up roughly a quarter of the house – huge relative to its overall size. It doubled as the laundry room. The problem with the kitchen was never its size so much as my parents’ complete inability to use the space effectively. (If you only have six drawers, maybe you shouldn’t use three of them as junk drawers. But whatever – I wasn’t paying the mortgage. At least I knew where to find the birthday candles, magic markers, and jacks.) Years ago, I was describing the room to a friend, who found it quite curious that the cereal, aluminum foil, and Tupperware steak marinator (which, sadly, melted in a terrible accident for which I may or may not have been responsible) were stored in the oven. I was equally puzzled by her confusion. After all, I explained, we couldn’t keep any of those things in the dryer- the open bag of Wise potato chips and today’s newspaper were in there.

In case you’re wondering, the unopened bags of Wise potato chips – of which there were always at least three – were on the floor of my father’s closet, usually tossed on top of the 57 rolls of Scott blue toilet paper. (My father bought white once. It was the only time I can remember worrying that my parents might divorce.)

At least the dryer served its intended purpose in addition to storage. I cannot remember a time when the washer even worked. The only time we used it was the holidays, when it served as the bar. We covered it in a giant plastic sheet emblazoned with a very jolly Santa, who held a banner that read “The Wallace’s.” (The apostrophe pains me still, as I’m quite certain it did my father, a closet grammarian.) It was made to cover the front door of the house, but why waste a very jolly Santa on the front door when you could use him on a very jolly washer-bar?

Where’s the logic? Try under the sink.

When you live in a truly small house like we did, you master the art of shoving 10 pounds of crap into a five-pound bag. The solutions didn’t always make sense. I don’t know why the coffee table ended up at the foot of my parents’ bed. Or why the Whitman’s Sampler was under the living room couch. I don’t know why my shoes were at the bottom of the linen closet. Don’t ask me why, when I wanted a banana, I had to hoist myself onto the dryer to grab the fruit bowl from the top of the fridge. I just did. It just was. And it was really great.

A couple of weeks ago, my friends and family convinced me to start a blog. I was all set to dive in, describing in ludicrous detail the latest of my misadventures. Then, life intervened. My family lost our true north when my beloved Uncle Sonny died. All the silly things that occupy my brain fell away, replaced with shock and shattering grief.

But there was something else: Precious time with my family. And, like any family, we mourn in our unique way. There were tears, stories, and photos; humor, absurdity, and exhausted laughter; comfort and time-honored rituals. In the spirit of family – what it means and how it ties us together – let’s examine some of those rituals.

This is why turkey sandwiches depress me.

I’m not entirely sure why our default comfort food has always been one of those divided disposable aluminum trays piled high with deli meat. Or, for that matter, why the chief mourners in this family immediately worry about what all the drop-ins are going to eat. Do the drop-ins expect to be fed? Won’t a neighbor bring over a casserole later today? Can’t we order pizza if anyone is hungry? After my mom died, I swear to you there was lunchmeat in our house within an hour. And that was 8:30 on a Sunday morning. I don’t ever want to see stacks of capicola before noon – and certainly not when I’ve just lost my mother.

I’m pretty sure it was the aluminum tray from my grandfather’s death that reappeared (because nothing disposable was ever disposed of in our house) every New Year’s Day, serving up our Club crackers and my father’s famous cheese dip. Happy New Year, Pop-pop.

You’re gonna wear that?

Do you remember Strawbridge & Clothier? Duh. If you’re from the Greater Philadelphia area, of course you do. Best place for funeralwear. How do I know? Because some combination of the women always made a panicked trip to Strawbridge’s, looking for the just-right outfit to convey several important things: Our respect, of course; Mass-appropriateness; the illusion that we had lost 10 pounds (despite eating three pounds of ham for breakfast); and our level in the mourning hierarchy.

Perhaps my favorite fashion moment was when my aunt showed me the tasteful basic black suit she would be wearing to her mother-in-law’s funeral – several weeks before her mother-in-law actually shuffled off this mortal coil. Best to be prepared, I guess. To this day, I still don’t know why we ended up at Strawbridge’s anyway.

In the interest of full disclosure, I feel compelled to confess one of the most ill-advised decisions of my early 20s. In retrospect, maybe the afternoon of my father’s wake wasn’t the very best time to make my first attempt – ever – to conduct an at-home waxing of my upper lip. But I just kept thinking of all those people hugging me, and looking at me, and I was already going to look a wreck and the stupid lip situation was only going to make it worse. How was I to know that hot wax is incredibly hard to control?

Moving on…

I never expected to write my very first personal blog about death. And what may seem like a somewhat flippant treatment of the subject is far from – it’s a celebration of the people who have brought me this far. In the end, we needed the sandwiches, and none of us cared what we wore. It’s always been about the togetherness. In those first days of grieving, we needed to be with the other people who would live the new normal with us, who understood what was lost. We still do – and I know that Uncle Sonny would love that.