Portieres. The Way We Lived, 1920's Detroit

They hung on brass rods to cover, when drawn, the archway between the piano room and the living room. They were a lovely blue color, heavy with significance, keeping the heat in and the cold out of a winter's day and night and held open by the coils of golden colored braided ropes with tasseled ends.

This was the way we lived in houses without central heating. The temperatures were often regulated by little pot bellied stoves with isinglass windows in each room or at least one on each floor of our house. Coal kept the room warm and gave a bluish look to the isinglass, flinging mysterious slender shapes against the isinglass. We were warned never to open the small door that housed the fire, although we really wanted to. The kitchen stove was a small wood burning stove used mostly for heating the kitchen but occasionally used for the big dinner cooking and baking. The other kitchen stove was a kerosene burning stove with two burners - just right for the regular meals - having nothing to do with keeping the house warm.

Portieres gave the house a grand look. They were away from the working space and that's why we loved them. They made us feel like princesses, my sister and I, as we approached their beauty and fingered the golden coils and thick brocade. But wait, there was also the decorative and carefree way to separate rooms: Curtains of Beads - beaded ribbons or strings, vertical swaying colorful beads - tossed aside with a sweeping gesture of a hand belonging to the bobbed hair, boyish figure, Charleston Prodigy Ingenue; the Darling of the 1920's (she had the vote, after all).