Upstairs

In the tender hush of 1915, the old Bryan house, its timbers smoothed by time’s gentle hand, saw its second floor reshaped, as if the house itself ached to stretch its limbs for the years to come. The original layout’s a shadow now, half-forgotten like a dream you can’t quite hold, but folks reckon the back half once mirrored the front—two grand bedrooms standing sentinel at each end, two smaller ones cradled soft in between, all woven together by a hallway that carried you from one to the next, like a breeze through an open door.

 

When John A. Bryan passed in 1914, his childhood home fell to his widow, Lynda Lee Bryan, a woman bound deep to Talbotton’s red clay. She loved a gathering, Lynda Lee did—kin spilling over, their laughter rising like heat from summer earth—and she set to remaking that second floor to hold the sprawl of family reunions. The back half’s walls came down, quiet as a prayer, giving way to one wide, generous room that spanned the house’s full hind side, a space that seemed to hum with the voices it would shelter.
They sank the floor nigh on three feet, rooting it closer to the ground, and eased three roof dormers outward to stand as wall dormers, their eyes widened to the world. Transom windows, delicate as a caught breath, were set to pull in the light—one lifted careful from the first floor’s center hall, another crafted to match its gleam. No fireplaces warm this room; it don’t need them, not with its seven-foot windows at either end, drinking deep of the day. A cedar closet, fragrant and still, waits at the stair landing, holding its secrets tight as a promise.

 

Now, in these later days, the upstairs stirs under patient hands, a restoration begun to call back what it can of the house’s first shape. But the lowered floor, sunk those three feet all those years ago, holds fast to its change—there’s no lifting it back to what it was. The dogtrot hallway, though, has been raised to its old height, its airy passage restored like a memory reclaimed. The work creeps slow, tender as a whispered tale, and it’ll be years yet before the house yields all it can to the past, its secrets kept safe in the grain of its beams.