Simple Living with Wanda Urbanska

Wanda's Diary Entries

Sunday, October 9, 2005

Thinking back to the Green Festival held two Saturdays earlier in Washington DC, we had the good fortune to stay at the home of Frank’s older sister, Montague, and her husband Charlie. They were going to be away from home that weekend and left us the keys to their home under the mat. It struck me as an incongrously mall-town, old fashioned sort of gesture of hospitality that you wouldn’t expect to see in Washington DC. Montague is a wonderfully generous person, and evidently she has no big city fear of someone breaking into her home. Nor did she have a burglar alarm system for us to disable.
The house itself appears to be relatively undisturbed since the 1920s. That’s what I love about it. It’s a “house that refused to die.” Most of the interior—from books, to furnishings to the bathrooms—appears to date from Charlie’s youth (he’s now in his 70s). Even the telephone—a black, heavy rotary dial desk phone—that sits in the front hall is much older than the wall-mounted unit from the Alexis Bailly Vineyard in Hastings, MN that we featured as a “thing that refused to die” in the first show of the second season.