Attics

I climbed the stairs to the attic in our house, an airless, boards-exposed room. The room was shaped like a triangle.  The air was dusty with specks, hovering.  In the Virginia summer, it was stifling.  I was five. 

The attic was a last home for the unused.  Or for things that my parents wouldn’t throw away.  The contents on the floor looked like a shipwreck on the bottom of the sea. It was as if the trunks and old wicker chairs and lamps without shades and bed headboards and reproductions of paintings all had settled haphazardly by currents on the floor.  There was no rhyme or reason why something was here and not there.  There were large spaces of floor between clusters of things.  Why? 

Nothing in the attic was important enough to be part of our everyday life.  For whatever reason, these things were sent to be there.  Something didn’t make sense about the attic to me. The rules were different than for the other rooms in our house.

There was a bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling with a slim chain.  I could just reach the end of it.  The lightbulbs downstairs were covered by shades.  Here, the light was not, and that seemed strange.  The slanting walls were unpainted, exposed.  There was one small window that faced outdoors, allowing in a portion of light, as if it were being rationed. 

Everything contributed to a sense of abandonment.  Nobody cared enough about the room to paint it, to light it properly or to decorate it.  Never mind that its purpose wasn’t to be lived in.  There was something about the room and its objects that seemed unloved.  Why else would it look that way?  Why else would these objects be put here and not downstairs where we lived?

Sometimes my younger brother and sister would come up to the attic with me.  We’d play with things we’d find on the floor.  We’d pretend we were pirates, and everything in the attic was our treasure.  The attic could be scary, too, since it had dark corners where something might be lurking.  There were no grownups there to protect us. 

Sometimes I went alone to the attic to hide.  That was when I didn’t like my life downstairs.  When there was danger.  When I was hurt.  When I was afraid.  I found a small opening in one of the walls to a sort of secondary attic. Like an animal going into a burrow, I would secrete myself there.  I didn’t want to be found. 

But no one looked for me.

When I walked down the stairs and back to my normal world filled with light and familiar objects, all in the places they always were, I was relieved.  However fraught, I had a place there.

In the years after, I saw many different attics in many different houses. In Maine, I stayed in a house where the attic had been made into a bedroom. The ceiling was still a downward sloping triangle, and when I stood up, I sometimes bumped my head. I opened the little window when I went to bed, and I heard the sound of foghorns and sometimes rain and thunder.  The morning light streamed through the little window, and I could smell the sea and hear the birds singing.

In a summer house where my first wife and I stayed on an island in Maine, there was another attic. The wood was unfinished pine, and it was filled with old iron beds and mattresses.  In the evening, our young daughter and her little friends would climb up there and laugh, away from us, and sleep on the beds we had made up for them.  They had the attic all to themselves, and there was a door they could close.  And they did. 

We could hear their giggles way past their bedtime. This was summer in Maine, and this, we thought, is what childhood is supposed to be.  So, for them, the attic, with its fragrance of pine and the scent of the sea was a happy refuge, a room of their own, and we didn’t impose our grownup rules on them.  If no one slept that well, because they were having too much fun and were too excited, then the next day they could nap in hammocks on the open porch that faced the water with a light breeze and summer scents lulling them to sleep.   

Not all attics, like families, are like the ones you began with. You make, or find, your own.