My mother didn’t want us playing in that oldest part of the house. She always insisted that it didn’t belong. It stood out off the back, where ages ago, when the house was a much larger structure, a grand hotel with spa, deliveries were made and inventories taken. As kids, we would never have guessed at such a rich history for our ramshackle old house.
The grownups spoke about boom times back in the day before even our parents were born. The boom times began in the late 1800s with the first discovery of crude oil in the U.S. and lasted through the Roaring ‘20s right up to the Great Depression. Not much around these parts survived after that.
When you’re a little girl, a bit naughty, a bit of a tomboy, hearing your mother fret about an old boarded up room being off limits was simply an enticement. What self-respecting, rambunctious 10-year-old wouldn’t want to explore such an ancient and hidden place? It wasn’t a very big room and decades of neglect had left it unbalanced, cantilevered to one side. Mom and Gram wanted Dad and Uncle Frank to tear it down entirely, first because it was “an eyesore” and then because they thought it dangerous. No, we weren’t supposed to go near it, let alone inside.
Drawn to the forbidden, I finally convinced my more cautious and constant companion, my cousin Joanie, to go exploring. Now Joanie was best as a lookout. She’d keep watch for big people, meaning not just parents, but our five older siblings who would either take over the adventure or rat us out to the grownups. I did reconnaissance, like in those World War II movies that filled tiny TV screens back in the ‘50s. In my imagination I was a brave soldier checking out an enemy outpost.
I began carefully peeking through the rotted-out door frame, but the view was just too limited. So then, balancing on my bike seat while it was propped up against the wall, I looked through dusty, broken windows into a space littered with boxes, filing cabinets, old broken bits of furniture, faded papers strewn around, and a calendar, still hanging by a nail on the far wall. There was a date circled on it. That was exciting. My imagination said it was a clue to the movements of the enemy. My head said, I want to see that calendar. What day was it? What month? What year?
Sometimes, when you’re a kid, you just have to find out these things. The world is such a big place, filled with big people, and you need to make your own space. We were surrounded by seemingly endless mountains and forests, dotted with run-down towns and villages, and one city two hours away by car. And in all that, you have to find your place.
Some kids might never feel that way. Joanie, I suspect, was one of them. Some kids already know their place, both assured of it and bounded by it from birth. Some just feel at home in the world. I felt at home only at home in that strange old house in Knapp Creek that was built to be something else entirely, only a fraction of its former glory still standing. And there was always some little itch at the back of my mind. What’s out there farther than I’ve ever gone, around the next turn? Or what’s in there, where you’re never supposed to go?
Later, after the adventure, my Gram would say, “There are ghosts in that room.” I believed her.
