Dear Readers,

I wonder what your vice is.  Uh, never mind.  Don’t tell me.  Please–I’m serious. However, I feel bold enough today to tell you mine.

It’s not tobacco, not alcohol, not gambling, not drugs…nothing so serious.  No–I confess that I am crazy about decorating magazines and HGTV.   Why, I don’t know because I’m not decorating or redecorating all the time.  I could read those magazines all day and all night.

Quite a few decades ago, I visited a former college classmate with another classmate and I felt a million miles away from them in my interests.  These two lovely ladies discussed flowered bedspreads and drapes versus solid bedspreads and drapes for exactly a half hour and I recall thinking that it was a torture to listen to this conversation and how I felt inadequate because I could care less about the topic.  Perhaps I was not a real woman.  I wanted to whip out the latest mystery, a chocolate donut or even that device that Star Trek Scotty used to beam himself up.

Now, at the wise age of sixty-four, I understand their fascination and I realize that I was delayed.   Now I pore over decorating magazines with the same passion that you might gaze at pastries in a super good bakery.

Let me refer to the latest issue of HGTV magazine where my favorite HGTV star, Genevieve Gorder, allows us a peek into the renovation of her home. I love her renovation (not that she’ll ever know or care) and I wonder if I, too, could have a bedroom door “which came from a fishing village in Southern Morocco.”  I don’t have Southern Morocco on my bucket list, but the list is proving flexible.

Genevieve’s four-hundred-year-old carved door is a keyhole design with carvings of fishhooks, the sun, and coral.  No kidding, I love it.  Really, I do!  I don’t want to covet it, but I’m wrestling with a teeny-weeny bit of envy.

I force myself to remember that I do have a 1983-1984 lauan bedroom door in my Cramer Hill home from Cherry Hill Home Depot that my brother, Bill, customized for me by putting the doorknob extra high.  That custom placement was not inspired by a designer, but by my active toddler’s  unnatural, frighteningly fast ability to unlock and open a door at normal height and to run out of the room while I folded laundry on the bed.  She did this before age one and fell down the steps.  Don’t worry.  She was okay, is now thirty-one and remains active.  She is a teacher and not a locksmith nor an escape artist.

My husband , Carlos, recently painted this door with the sky-high doorknob a shiny bright white with the rest of the bedroom.  He likes to paint—not.  However, he likes to make his wife happy and I am.

The Home Depot man in the paint department advised against the semi-gloss, “It will look like a mirror.”  He shook his head.  I bet his wife has their bedroom painted in semi-gloss and it keeps him awake all night.  But, I love the door.

I might not have that carved Moroccan door, but, hey.  I don’t want it anyway.  (Sour grapes.) What if Reina or Lovey or Bello dared to scratch it?  (Cats.)  What if it cost so much that my homeowner’s insurance rate soared? (Allstate.)   What if I missed my lauan, shiny white door with the memory of Kim as a toddler?  (Kim, I still miss ya.)

Well, readers, talk to you later.  My decorating magazines await me on this rainy afternoon and I’m content that Genevieve and I both have our very special bedroom doors.

Written by Marguerite Ferra, Camden, NJ