8:182) Hope O'Keeffe 22-APR-98 12:13

Stripping down the wallpaper in my grandmother's house, we would find the scrawled, dated signatures of aunts and uncles on the cracked yellow wall. Lois loves Wally, Millie loves Jim. I make pilgrimages to 41 Addington Road when I'm in Boston, reach through the back fence to touch the wishing rock for luck. The new people (there for twenty years now) say that my grandfather's room is haunted, but he's friendly, and giggle at the discovery of the layers of graffiti, sole reminders of my grandmother's insatiable penchant for redecoration. In my own house, cracking paint over peeling wallpaper over creviced plaster, layers over layers. Who knows what signatures lurk beneath? In demolishing the upstairs walls, the carpenters find a worn 1920's dime (a serious loss back then), a box of shotgun cartridges, an editorial extolling the virtues of Calvin Coolidge and predicting that the roar will last forever. Just like Lois and Wally.