An unusual observation

So there I was, in the dark, dingy, dilapidated laundry room doing laundry.  At first I spent as little time in there as possible as it stank to high heaven from having been the resident weasel’s toilet.  Shortly after I moved out to the farm I coaxed Leif into helping me remove everything from the room and I very literally hosed the whole room down.  Not to worry, the laundry room is built basically over wooden decking so there’s no basement or crawl space below and, as there’s a hole in the floor, what water I couldn’t mop up drained through the cracked linoleum tile out of the room and into what’s likely a weasel condo below.  After an equally liberal application of Pine-sol, the room was passably clean, but despite all that scrubbing I still only gave it’s ancient decor a cursory inspection.  It appeared to have some faded colonial/cottage-y wall boarder.

Then, out of the blue, yesterday, as I sorted laundry, it occurred to me that there were images of flying witches on the wall boarder.

Odd, I thought.

The more I thought about it the more odd it seemed that someone in the past would have decorated the laundry room with a witch wall boarder.   At length I finished sorting and stood staring directly at the boarder thinking, now why didn’t I notice those witches before?

So, I got on the step stool and got a closer look.

Blame it on my wonky eye, or blame it on the faded colors.  Or even blame it on the fact I just finished reading The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane, by Katherine Howe, which I enjoyed very much by the way, but what I thought were witches flying brooms over a colonial New England town were actually angels with itsy bitsy nearly invisible wings in dark robes blowing trumpets.

Now I don’t know what’s more strange:  that I thought they were witches, or that someone would like wall boarder with the ugliest angels I could imagine.

I always say, there’s no accounting for taste, and this my friends is a case in point.