In the late 70’s, when I was in high school, Mom had this swell idea to completely redecorate a bedroom for me. Mom did all the work herself. New paint, new carpet (lime green!!!), new walltex. The walltex had been a problem. I was not agreeing to any of the scads of samples she showed me. They were girly, and cutesy, and otherwise uninteresting to me. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful for what Mom was trying to do, but I was not pleased with the choices she presented me. I was ready to throw in the towel and just pretend to really, really, really like whatever she showed me next—so she could get the project underway and git ‘er done. And then Mom brought me a sample of the walltex you see here, with its rustic farmhouse vibe. Call me Holly Hobbie, but I immediately agreed to it from the very insides of my innards. I liked it bigly time.Mom liked it so well, she left it on the walls for years. A couple of decades later, when I was long gone from my childhood home, Mom redecorated the bedroom once again. On my next birthday or Christmas (I forget which occasion it was), I opened up the present from Mom to find this strip of my high school walltex in a custom-built wood frame, ready for hanging on the wall as a picture. She remembered all those years how hard we had struggled to find a walltex design I would be happy about living with. It was a sweet surprise for me to receive this old piece of walltex so many years later. It’s another of Mom’s skills: Mom knows how to pull off the Grand Gesture when giving a gift, even if it is simply a piece of used wallpaper.
