Sometimes, a rug isn't just a rug

The workers at Azar's in Naples re-serge
our family's 25-foot-long Sarouk carpet.

Sometimes, a rug isn't just a rug

Grandma's oriental rug always was one of the wonders of family lore.

It's beautiful. The carpet is huge. Most houses are not.

And my mother is making sacrifices so she can keep it.

But this floor covering is not just any carpet.

My great-grandmother, Martha Bolender, bought the 25-foot Sarouk around 1930 for the living room she added onto her family home in Connersville, Ind.

Martha's home (at left) was a beautiful space, a Queen Anne Victorian manse that remained magical in the collective memories of our family.

Sadly, Martha died young — she was only 58. And this woman, who my grandmother, Kathryn, idolized, is a mere flicker in the memories of her grandchildren.

In 1951, two years after Martha died, my great-grandfather, Joel, sold the house, which was converted into a nursing home. He couldn't get the price he wanted for the rug, so it went into storage.

Then, seven years later, my grandparents decided to move to Florida. They chose a floor plan and showed it to my great-grandfather, and he smiled.

"Your living room would hold Mother's rug."

Grandma said she'd use it until she got something else. Years later, she told me she couldn't believe she had been so flip about something so gorgeous.

Four generations of children have played on it now. My grandfather's young cousins would have trotted their toys out on it in the 1930s. You can see a shadowy outline of its design in the 1940s home movies we have of those cousins' children and my mother and aunt playing on it. I remember following the border of the carpet like a train track. My own little nieces and nephew have grown up with it, too.

My grandfather died 10 years ago, and Grandma has been gone nearly three years now.
But we didn't know what to do with the house — the neighborhood has deteriorated.

But my mother knew she didn't want to lose the rug and its memories.

So it's only logical that my mother is renovating my grandparents' home to make it her own, and to spend a few more years with the carpet and the memories. The rug is being lovingly restored and will be returned to the living room of the home it has had for more than 50 years.

Our family has had the rug for 80 years now. I'll lobby for 80 more.