Secret hiding place

One of the greatest features about my bedroom was the walk-in closet. It was about 3-4 feet wide by about 7-8 feet long with shelves along the far end and along the top. It was always a mess, littered with shoes, clothes, toys, posters, and other clutter.

But underneath the lowest shelf at the back of the closet was a hole, not much larger than a doggie door. Beyond the hole was a small crawl space, as wide as my closet but only about half as long. The roof angled down to the right, so the ceiling was too low for anyone to be able to stand up straight. Beyond the crawl space were support beams that stretched over the front porch of the house, exposed fiber glass insulation in-between the beams.

My dad told me and my sisters to never go beyond the crawl space. He said it wasn’t structurally sound for people to be walking back and forth and that if we were to try to cross the beams we would fall through onto the porch.

A rough outline - not drawn to scale.

The reason for this warning was because he knew that this secret path was too cool to resist. You see, Nicole’s room was right next to mine. She had the same walk-in closet with the hole and crawl space at the back. Hers was on the left side of her room while mine was on the right. The beams and fiber glass over the front porch completed a secret path from my room to hers.

How could we resist?

I don’t remember ever traversing the beams to sneak into my sister’s room (though this doesn’t mean I didn’t do it). Nicole, on the other hand, was fearless and invaded my room this way at least once. Sometimes this was necessary, as our bedroom doors had old locks with skeleton keys, which was a lot of fun to show off, but sometimes they stuck and we would lock ourselves out of our rooms. But we could unlock it from the inside…

No one ever fell through the fiber glass onto the front porch. Though our dad may have known we crossed the beams, we were never caught.

When I was 12, my best friend, Brianna, and I decided to make the crawl space our secret fort – like our own clubhouse.

With a couple of flashlights and poster paint, which didn’t spread very well on the wood-slated walls, we went into the crawl space at the back of my closet and covered the walls with hearts, our initials, B.F.F. promises, and pictures. (I’ll try to get in there and get pictures to post next week.) It was really something special that I was able to share with my best friend.

As I got older, and the crawl space lost some of its intrigue and mystery, I started using the space to hide personal items. When my first boyfriend and I broke up, I put all of the momentos that reminded me of him in two shoe boxes and placed them just inside the the hole, off to the left. That way, they wouldn’t be visible if someone were to open the make-shift door and peer into the crawl space. I forgot about those items. Over the years, I stumbled upon them once or twice. But it wasn’t until I was packing my room, preparing to move into the dorms at college, that I found them and really looked through what I had saved from that first relationship.

As a child and an adult, this was one of the greatest secret hiding places I’ve ever encountered.

 

The kitchen floor

I don’t really remember the first conflict that brought my mom, my sisters, and I to the kitchen floor of our home. Perhaps it was the first time we thought we were going to lose the house. It might have been after the first time my mom and dad told us they were getting a divorce. Maybe it was when my mom told us that she was sick – anorexia. Whatever the first occasion may have been, my mom, my sisters, and I would return to the kitchen floor in the midst of hardships and conflicts many times over the years. With our back pressed against kitchen cabinet, door frames, and appliances, we would talk, cry, and console. Through many of the years, Baloo, our half Black Lab – half Newfoundland, 150-pound dog would flatten himself against the floor, his head resting in one of our laps, trying to bring comfort in any way he was able. He took up most of the room, and we loved him for it.

Soon we will be losing the house. Over the course of my childhood, I heard this several times. Each time, my mom managed to find another way to tweak the finances so that we could stay. We tightened our belts. My sisters and I got jobs. We worked together to accommodate shortages so that we could keep our home.

Now my sisters and I are grown. Nicole, the oldest, is married with two beautiful little girls. Holli, the youngest, is married with the world at her fingertips, as her husband embraces his new military career. And I am hundreds of miles away (for now), spirited off by career aspirations, living in a place that is not my home. Until late this past winter, when the heat went out for the second time of the season, my mom was holding down the fort, opening the doors to all of us as life’s tribulations brought us home in search of comfort.

The house is spacious and welcoming with four bedrooms, an office, three bathrooms, a darkroom, kennel, shed, sewing house, greenhouse, garage, and a (broken) hot tub. It was ordered out of a Sears catalog in 1908 and delivered in pieces by train. The town doctor bought this house and used it as his office space after it was completed in 1910. Holli liked to boast that it would be 100 years old the same year she turned 21.

Our home was a central hub in our minds. We were within walking distance of the elementary school, middle school, and high school. Dari Mart, the local corner store that ate our allowances, was four blocks up the street. The Ben Franklin was further away, in the heart of downtown, but also a favorite place for us to go and buy decks of cards, fuzzy coloring posters, and pencils. Most of the time, we could go wherever we wanted with only one condition: “Hang a whistle,” my mom always said. It was her theory that screaming children didn’t receive the same urgent attention as a whistle would, and this was how we were to alert anyone if we were in trouble.

More than anything, Nicole wants to raise her growing family in the home and community that raised us, and kept us safe during the most vulnerable years of our lives. As she says, even now, “It’s perfect. It’s the perfect house.” Painfully, this is an aspiration that no one our family can afford to make a reality.

We are grieving. The loss isn’t yet final, but still we grieve, and I long for the comfort of our kitchen floor. Kitchen floor gatherings don’t guarantee solutions, but they bring us together for support and comfort to help my mom, my sisters, and I tackle some of the greatest challenges we face.