How someone chooses to decorate their rooms can tell you a lot about that person. Are they neat? Is their bed made? Is there anything on their walls?Wall decor is important because it usually takes some effort to mount, and will most likely always be in view. One specific wall decoration that has graced the walls of teenagers for decades, is the poster.

Posters are usually quite large, and can depict anything from your favorite musician to your favorite piece of artwork. They are something that you use to define your space, objects that you are okay with looking at every day. I have gone through several posters throughout my life, and I have recycled the same ones for most of my time living in New Paltz. Posters serve the function of decoration, but can also induce reflection.

I’m choosing to reflect upon this specific poster, one that used to hang on my wall at my parent’s house but is now here with me in New Paltz. It belonged to my mother, and was purchased in 1984 during a ski trip she took with her brother in Chamonix, France. She was supposed to go with a friend who ended up getting sick, resulting in her brother needing to somehow obtain a passport in two weeks. Luckily, he worked for someone with connections in Washington who pulled a few strings. The poster had caught her eye in a shop window, and she purchased it right away.

The poster was given to me in the frame pictured above, which may be the cheapest frame I’ve ever seen. It has four plastic caps for each edge, but they frequently slide off and fall on the floor. The poster somehow manages to stay secure despite the frame’s tendency to not do its job.

The style of the poster makes me think that it once functioned as an advertisement. The words at the bottom translate to “80 years of winter sports,” which seems like some sort of tagline that the ski mountain may have used. However, in the hands of my mother, this poster served as a souvenir or memento of a trip she took with her brother. It amazed me that she kept it long enough for it to end up on her youngest daughter’s bedroom wall. Interestingly enough, when she got back from France the poster stayed rolled up until she got married and moved to Rockland in 1987. Why didn’t she unroll it and mount it on her wall when she got back? For three years, was its function just to take up space? She told me that her apartment “was ugly and she didn’t want to put the pretty poster on the wall,” but wouldn’t the pretty poster make the ugly apartment a little more attractive? The poster has some wrinkles in it as proof of wear over time, yet the colors seem just as vibrant as they were in 1984.

For me, this poster is a wall decoration that is visually pleasing, and is an important piece of the puzzle in creating the ambiance of my space. Sometimes I forget that it ever belonged to my mother, but occasionally I do think about the trip she took to France with her brother all those years ago. Its function for me is decoration, with the occasional spark of reflection on the past.