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War and Peas
Jane and Shelley volunteer to work at categorizing items for the Snellen Museum in preparation for their move to new quarters. They also get roped into pretending to be frontier women in a Civil War re-enactment, where the museum director is really shot. In a quiet moment later, Jane explores the museum.
Jane knew if she went back to the boardroom she wouldn't be able to do any work amid a roomful of people, so she decided to take advantage of the fact that the museum was closed and roam around on her own. She was feeling overloaded by people and opinions and facts. Especially since so many of the facts and opinions were so hard to sort out and place in one camp or the other.
She went upstairs to the second floor. She'd been up here once as a room mother on a field trip, but never on her own. To the right of the wide, well-worn oak stairs was a series of "period" rooms that a visitor could walk through. A late-Victorian bedroom, parlor, and kitchen.
She liked the way the velvet-roped path through the center of the rooms, rather than having to view them from the doorway, and the Snellen Museum had banned identifying tags on everything. At each doorway was a guide to the room, a little drawing that numbered and described each item on display. That was nice. Much more realistic and less "museum-y."
Since there were no other visitors, she had the imaginary house to herself. Perhaps it was the recent experience of trying to imagine herself in an earlier time, perhaps not, but she found herself pretending this was a real home.
The bedroom had masses of little things to dust -- pictures, paper flowers, vases, lamps with hideous ruffled and fringed shades. The parlor was much the same and crammed with furniture that would have been waxed at least weekly by a house-proud Victorian wife. Or her maid, Jane thought. And the lady of a house like this one would probably seldom have enter the kitchen. Some poor cook had to cope with the huge, sullen oven with all the ornamental bits to collect grease, the cold granite sinks, pump for water, the huge, heavy bowls and cooking pans.
How did they survive such a life? Jane wondered. She'd have to make a point of remembering this display the next time she became cranky about car pools, computer glitches, and vacuum cleaner ailments.
Did people who made their living in the museum business ever just roam around and let their imaginations run riot? Or did they come to regard the place in a strictly business sense, losing sight of the forest with concern for the trees? Had Regina Palmer ever stood here pretending this was her kitchen and she was the woman who had to haul the dirty dishwater out the back door and dump it next to the kitchen garden? Had she imagined sleeping in that high bed and having to find the little steps in order to climb down to use the chamber pot at night?
Or had Regina, out of necessity and perhaps inclination, been more concerned with tour schedules, salary increments, accounting procedures, professional publications, and the quest to snag touring exhibits?
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