It doesn't look like much, especially in this bleak photo where half the items had been stripped away. This was the last time I would see the old attic, that summer that my mom passed away.
As a kid, this was a Magic Place, like my grandfather's house. That empty corner you see at right was once filled with cardboard boxes covered in old sheets, ones that held old photograph albums; a big box of "Reader's Digest" issues (mine) going back to the 1950s (I would pick up old ones at yard sales); vintage books, including what was left of mom's old library; my dad's World War II souvenirs (one a pistol he confiscated from a German officer); Mom's old tatting magazines; and my 1970s "American Girl" issues (not the present magazine; this was a publication of the Girl Scouts). Very dimly at back you can see my child-sized Boston rocker (which I regret leaving behind). There was nothing better on a rainy day or a snowy day (if I could stand the cold like Jo March; as in her garret, the attic wasn't heated) than to creep up the stairs and tug the cord on the lightbulb set in the ceiling, to sit scrunched up on the rocker, looking through the old wartime newspapers my mom had saved, with their maps of the battle lines of Europe, and one stark front page announcing that FDR had died; the newer newspapers covering the assassination of John F. Kennedy; the old hurricane book the Providence Journal put out in 1954 after Hurricane Carol, comparing the damage in 1954 versus "the big one" in 1938; or the wonderful book sections of those old "Reader's Digests." In other corners were the summer clothes/curtains/bedspreads if it were winter and vice versa; the wicker picnic baskets; the hurricane lamp; the bowling trophies; my kindergarten graduation gown; my school box with old "Bain Bugle" issues and classmate photos; and my old stuffed animals. Everything had a coating of grime and dust, hence the old sheet covers, and I'd have to scrub my hands when I got through, but it was always worth it and I could hardly wait to go again.
For Mom and Dad, I suppose, it represented a disappointment, as it was never intended as an attic. It was actually an unfinished second story, and should have looked like my Confirmation godmother's house upstairs, with the slanting eaves over the beds of my best friend and of her older brother. My parents were hoping for three or four children, and would have put those eaves to excellent use. Instead the place became a time machine I dipped into at will.
Now the time machine resides inside my head, and sometimes a photo online, or a scent, or a book, or a scene will prompt a memory to the fore. I think I'll air them out here once in a while. Just to keep the dust down, you understand...
