every time i saw that willow-enclosed house it looked the same : grey shingles on a steep , crooked roof , faded yellow paint that seemed to regenerate flakes ( it was always peeling , forever it appeared to me , and it still remains a mystery how that sad expanse of weathered wood kept shedding yellow all those years and had any paint left on the day aunt addy died ) ; smoky windows that sucked in the light but killed it somehow once it got inside ; old browned wall paper that just got darker and darker as the years of my youth fled by ; old , old , old , old things crammed into every room stuff that mostly originated from the nineteenth century , cause aunt addy hated to buy anything new when the old would serve ; and she made double sure that it usually did , getting it repaired over and over again , or fixing it herself , reconstituting the moribund items of her home with a few more years of life .