Object-ives #24: The Brown Wall-to-Wall Carpet of My Childhood Home

Many secrets were hidden in its mottled earth

Feb 27, 2026

young woman sitting on cushioned wooden chair smiling atop brown carpet in what appears to be a living room — The author in the early 1990s

The house I grew up in had brown wall-to-wall carpet in every room, like a layer of dark soil beneath us. As a kid, I traced my fingers through its meandering lines while I read Little Women on my bedroom floor. When my younger sister was a baby, she delighted in grabbing the shaggy fibers in her chubby fists, trying to pull them up like grass. My older sister, who was troubled in ways I would never understand, vacuumed the carpet in patterns that soothed her.

Too frugal to replace the carpet just because it was ugly, my immigrant parents simply accepted it as another unfortunate part of the American dream, along with winter and bosses who couldn’t pronounce their names. Raising three daughters, forging careers in a foreign land, and their struggling marriage took precedence over correcting this petty crime of interior design.

In the kitchen, the dusky strands absorbed the scent of my mother’s cooking, our weekly West Indian menu of potato curry, dal, and roti. In the living room, the carpet buffered the soundtrack of the Bollywood films we watched on weekends. When I became a student of Bharatanatyam dance in third grade, the pile in the den matted under my bare feet as I practiced.

For six years, the brown carpet hid my family’s stains and shrouded our secrets. Buried in its swirling crevices was the bitter dust of every argument and silence. The coarse covering muffled the echoes of feet stomping up the stairs, doors slamming, and voices raised in anger and protest. In moments of chaos I still struggle to understand, it stifled slaps, shoves, and sobs. The brown carpet became the mottled earth from which we grew, unsteady but always reaching for the light.

After my parents divorced and my father moved out, my older sister discovered hardwood flooring beneath the brown carpet. We were stunned to realize it had been there all along. That summer, my mother, my sisters, and I rid the house of its mangy padding. We pulled and hacked at the carpet, sneezing and coughing from the grime, gouging our fingers on the staples. We stuffed the torn shards into trash bags and dragged them to the end of the driveway.

When we were finished, the house was transformed, lightened physically and emotionally. Taking off the carpet was like removing heavy makeup from a performer to reveal the unadorned face beneath, beautiful in its raw vulnerability. Our words echoed from room to room; there was nothing to smother our voices. At 12, I knew that a house could be a battleground. In the years to come, my mother taught me how the same space could become a refuge.

By the time I was in high school, my mother had left the corporate world, completed her yoga teacher training, and repurposed the den as her yoga studio. On Sunday mornings, her students criss-crossed the floor with colorful mats, the room echoing with the sound of “Om.” Everyone who visited commented on how calm and welcoming the space was. They would never know about the years of the brown carpet, and how my mother had to fight for our peace. Eventually, my own two children crawled across the bare wooden planks, unaware of their hard-won story.

In 2020, the house was sold after 34 years. The brown carpet exists only in old photos, a reminder of my family’s past and all that we have overcome.

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