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A collective calling
Posted by:
monkey on
January 29, 2008 at
2:04PM EST
There are lots of ways to keep a marriage fresh. Danville’s Nora and Terry Ross, married for 30 years and counting, have developed their own system.
“He goes up there sometimes, turns the heat on and I don’t see him all day,” Nora said looking upward from the bottom of the attic stairs inside the couple’s home.
Terry said he’s not the only one driven to distraction.
“When she watches TV, she doesn’t really watch,” he half-complained.
But don’t mistake their long separations for proof they don’t enjoy each other’s company. Separation is not their secret.
Their secret is they both share the addiction of collecting, and they are about as like-minded as two people can be.
Different directions
When Terry goes up the stairs to the converted attic, he is entering a world of his own creation.
The stair walls are covered with antique-looking metal signs and photographs of cars. He has collected miniature cars for years, and you can see them neatly parked against the angled walls as you crest the top stair. They take up almost every inch of one full room.
But his pride and joy sits in the adjoining room — rather, is the adjoining room.
Ross has constructed a scale-size mountainous trail for his numerous train sets, which he has also collected for years. Clouds are painted on the
ceiling.
There are bare spots to place more track, more trees, a lake and a
mountain village not yet
incorporated.
He already is writing his own version of the book of Genesis in his head, but only after enacting Revelations and tearing the entire set down when the couple moved from another house in Danville a few years ago. They moved here from Rossville in 1992.
The track features several exchange loops, crosses a three-foot-high bridge at one point and shows all of the signs of a work in progress.
Terry is not alone in his diversions. For Nora’s distraction in front of the TV can also be traced to her proclivity to collect.
She has become a property mogul, in miniature proportion, building more than 20 1/12-scale, model dollhouses. She also has her own room.
Much of her TV time is shared cross-stitching items for one of her houses (cross-stitching is another love of Nora, having won awards for work that hangs around the couple’s home), or making clay food to include in some of the scenes she creates inside them.
“You kind of make little stories in your head as you go along,” she said.
Though Ross has offered up some of her dollhouses for charity fundraisers, all standing 2- to 3-feet tall and made of plywood from pre-cut kits, her second-floor room, just down the hall from the attic stairs, still has about a dozen decorated houses in various stages of completion.
Most are of Victorian design, though she also has also constructed a one-room schoolhouse and church, and is currently working on a modern-design house.
“There are four in boxes that I haven’t even started,” she said. “I told my husband when he bought the first dollhouse that he was opening up a hornet’s nest.”
Common thread
The hornets’ nest that provided the collecting buzz in the couple was actually first stirred after they moved to Danville and both retired.
Terry has always had a weakness for purchasing “dream cars” — the real, drivable ones — but after retiring three years ago he switched to a more-serious pursuit of miniatures. That led to trains.
“I can remember when I had a train, so I just wanted to try it once again,” he said.
Nora’s first dollhouse, an
already-built model, was purchased on the sly by Terry after she had admired it during a shopping trip.
“He made all the arrangements and didn’t even tell me,” she said. “It just took off from there.”
Nora has been retired for 10 years and has filled many hours assembling and decorating the houses.
And that’s where the two arrive at the same imaginary town together — they are constantly on the lookout for accessories either for the dollhouses or the train set. They make shopping trips to far-flung doll store locations and look forward to the next collector’s magazine.
While some of the specifics on the houses, like wallpaper and lampshades, can be printed on computer, and other items like the food can be made by hand, some of the custom-built furniture has been too nice to resist.
“I just see something that hits my fancy and I usually know where I want to put it,” she said. “Or sometimes I find something I really like, buy it, then figure out where to put it.”
Details of some of rooms get specific enough to include wall paintings that are so small they must be painted by hand with a straight pin.
“It does get frustrating sometimes,” she added. And expensive. One of the reasons the Rosses make many of their own items is that custom dollhouse can run as high as $400 for something as small as a living room chair.
“If I had known things were that expensive I probably wouldn’t have gotten that first one,” Nora said. “Our dining room table became a clay-food factory for about a month-and-a-half.”
Way of life
The hobbies have kept the couple creative and active in their retirement years, and they’ve been able to do it together while still getting private time to pursue their own passions.
“We work on this together,” Nora said. “It’s just the fun of doing. It’s another outlet for creative thinking for us.”
Terry has even been won over by Nora’s construction projects, building and furnishing several pieces on his own, including a scale-model auto-repair shop, a southern plantation and a series of log-cabin scenes. They are starting to edge out a clean-shot view of the car collection.
It keeps them both thinking, even during an evening of television, about the other worlds that sit just at the top of the stairs.
“I know what I need in a lot of them, so one of these days I’ll just get up out of nowhere and go make curtains,” she said.
“If at all possible, I prefer to make it myself, too,” Terry added. “It means more.”
Even if it takes all day.
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