Ma’s aesthetic sense was yawningly conventional.

Not that I knew any better at the time, you realize.

Still, recollections of my mother’s house are all markedly lacking in character. Her top priority was to have all of the requisite status items of the period on full display — in order to demonstrate that the apocryphal Jonses had not receded quite out of her sight.

Never mind that no one ever visited us to see them.

Her second goal was to have the house look as impeccably neat and coordinated as an illustration in a magazine article. Being a solidly proletarian household, the target magazine in question was at the Family Circle end of the scale, rather than the Architectural Digest end.

The worst of the damage was done when, like many other married women who had spent the war years in an aircraft factory, Ma chose to return to the workforce for a self-defined, limited period in order to earn the money for a pet project.

In many cases such womens’ pet projects were things like the children’s college education fund, or the family’s trip to Europe. (Sorry, I mean, of course, the family’s Trip to Europe — such projects were always thought of in capitals.) In Ma’s case, the project was Redecorating the House Throughout. By the time I was eight, the house was freshly done up in low-ticket 3-piece suites and the comfortable, idiosyncratic jumble of solid old ’20s and ’30s pieces had been swept away. I missed them. The new furniture was scratchy and unpleasant. Fortunately the worst examples of this pogrom were set up in the living room where I was not allowed.

Whatever flickering bursts of individuality that had managed to survive the purge were, for the most part, kind of tacky. (Ma was rather a vulgar little body at heart. Unfortunately, she was quite unconscious of this, so never got any fun out of it.)

Things like my first baby shoes, bronzed and made into bookends had pride of place on the mantle of the front room’s false fireplace, with four gradually yellowing, never reread, book-club editions of murder mysteries securely in their grasp. A rather “moderne”-ly shaped bottle rescued from a neighbors’ bin on trash day, filled with water and green food coloring — to look like Creme de Menthe — lived on a shelf in the kitchen window where it caught the light, etc. Such pallid little blossoms of the vernacular were weeds in a garden which otherwise never bloomed at all. The whole place was a rather painful exercise at an attempted statement of “good taste” by a person who hadn’t any.

Dad, apparently, had nothing to say in this. His aesthetic background was nonexistent, aesthetics not being considered a relevant study for farm boys back in the ’10s and teens. And, of course, Dad was a man who never passed up an opportunity to not think about something. (Which, unfortunately, didn’t usually protect him — or us — from his not having anything to say on the matter.)

I vaguely recall protesting that the old stuff was nicer than the new stuff (it was certainly more comfortable), but the concerns of a seven-year-old were not what this particular exercise was all about.