We’re getting ready to downsize from our big Victorian house to a small modern one, and to get the old girl ready to sell, Jim and I have been inspecting her to decide how many contractors will be able to retire on our dime. In the living room I noticed a small screw tightly fastened into a windowsill, and when I remembered how it got there, I realized that I will have a difficult time performing plaster surgery on our family history.
Here’s the story of the screw. About 10 years ago, when Jim was setting up the Christmas tree, he stepped back to see if it was straight. Our green monster leaned forward to indicate it wasn’t, so we attached fishing wire to the tree and screwed hardware into the sill to prop it up. Jim had to listen to me explain how Hanukkah wasn’t this much of a pain, but I should have eaten my words (instead of latkes) because an unattended menorah left a burn mark on our kitchen counter.
In the dining room, there’s a mark on one wall behind a chair we used for “time out’’ when the kids were little. When Cameron was about 4, he paid a short visit after ignoring our warnings to simmer down at the dinner table. We continued eating in the kitchen, but out of the corner of my eye I noticed flying clothes in the dining room. Cam was still sitting in the chair, but the little Houdini managed to wiggle around, take off his clothes, and fling them to remind us that he was there. All we could do was laugh - and Cam still knows how to charm his way out of trouble.
We have a three-season porch with tongue-and-groove ceiling boards. It was in perfect, unpainted condition when we bought the house in 1983, but soon after we moved in we decided to insulate the drafty dwelling. We came home from work one day and while I was sitting on the porch to relax before dinner, I looked up and saw what looked like a covered bingo card above my head. The workers installed the insulation by drilling holes the size of a cucumber slice in the boards. We took the contractor to court and won (he didn’t show), and after more than 25 years the plugs almost match the stain of the boards.
The kitchen floor has beige ceramic tiles that are peppered with small chips from dropped pots and other objects. There’s a whopper of a gouge that came from Lizzie Borden’s ax. Jim and I used to have an annual Halloween party where all costumes had to begin with the same letter of the alphabet. For the “L’’ year, Lizzie dropped her ax on the floor.
In 1992 when Elise was 5, we hung a wooden “growth stick’’ on the moulding outside her bedroom. On the kids’ birthdays, we’d measure them and record the dates on the stick. When they grew taller than the stick, we started writing on the moulding. We still measure Elise and Cam on their birthdays.
In middle school, Elise moved to the third floor, which she named “Elise’s World.’’ The merits of natural wood were not embraced by our budding Georgia O’Keeffe, so she covered the unpainted doors and woodwork with swirls of color.
Soon after we bought the house, owners from the ’60s knocked on our door and asked if they could see their former home. We learned a few of their stories, including one about the swimming pool in the backyard. Mr. Brown was in the filter business and decided to build his own pool, so he, Mrs. Brown, and their five kids built an Olympic-size hole in the ground using cinder blocks. It took Jim and me several years to decide whether to restore the pool or fill it in, but we finally came up with a good reason to fill it in: We don’t swim. So we removed a piece of the Brown’s family history.
It will be sad to leave the Wulff stories behind for the new owners to erase, but they have to write their own stories - and we have to write new ones.
June Wulff can be reached at jwulff@globe.com. 
