By Molly MacDonald
When you read this, I will have been traveling again. Not by plane this time but by motor car. Don’t you love the term “motor car?” It’s almost as lovely as “roadster.” Nancy Drew drove a roadster while wearing a silk frock. I fully intend to motor somewhere in a roadster wearing a silk frock someday. This non-roadster trip, however, is to Minneapolis to spend a few days with oldest daughter, Heather, and family, to attend grandson Connor’s high school graduation. The trouble is, I will get home a few days past the deadline for this column. Thus, I am cheating a bit and resurrecting a column from a few years ago. Here goes:
Inkspots, February 20, 1985
Attics are wondrous things. The big, rambling, across-the-whole-top-of-the-house attic. You know, the kind in grandmother’s house.
In my growing-up years, I was blessed with two grandmothers who had houses with huge attics. My grandmother Sullivan, Nana to my sister and me, lived next door in the big gray house her parents built. Our children’s grandmother lives there now, so they, too, know the joys of playing in their grandmother’s attic. The old steamer trunks are still there, filled with feathered hats, crinkly taffeta skirts and blouses with leg-o-mutton sleeves. My sister and I delighted in bringing our friends up there to dress up in the ancient finery.
Nana’s attic was also the site of our family detective agency. My sister Sheila and her pal Alice started it. They had signs posted all over the attic saying, “Holmes and Watson, private detectives, KEEP OUT.” The last part was aimed at me and my friend Marilyn. We were four years younger and inclined to be pests. Of course, the signs and accompanying verbal threats just spurred us on to do our very best to be as disruptive as possible. I think we managed quite well.
When Sheila and Alice graduated to curling and combing each other’s hair and giggling about boys, Marilyn and I took over the detective business. We used to sneak around the neighborhood and eavesdrop on enemy conversations, then hustle back to the attic to record the evidence. Occasionally, we would first wrap our notes in wax paper, and bury them under the bushes by the alley. I’m not sure just why, but it seemed the logical thing to do at the time. We were always sure that the whole world was dying to capture our notes, so elaborate precautions were necessary.
My other grandmother, Mollie Kelly, lived in Emmetsburg, also in a big gray house with a nifty attic. My cousin, Margaret Ann, and I loved to play up there, mainly because of the forbidden tank. The forbidden tank was the winter home of a number of huge goldfish that spent the summer months in a rock pool in the garden.
The fish tank had four-feet high sides and covered most of the attic corner near the stairs. Whenever Margaret Ann and I headed toward the attic, Grandmother, or one of our mothers or uncles would caution, don’t go near the tank. We’d nod, solemnly, then beat a path to the fish tank as fast as we could, hanging over the sides with wicked delight.
Just a few years ago, Grandmother Kelly‘s house was sold. Margaret Ann and I were elected to sort through all the things stored in the attic. By this time, we both had become grown-ups, a fate that seemed impossibly far away in our beat-you-to-the-forbidden-tank days.
Funny thing was, when we settled in to clean out the attic, all of a sudden we were nine years old again. The forbidden tank had long since disappeared, but the delicious feeling of stolen time, a banding together against the world of adults, all came back.
Our children would have been amazed to see how silly their mothers could be. Someday, though, they’ll understand: the secret knowledge we always thought grown-ups possessed doesn’t come magically at a certain age. The secret is that we all have a touch of Peter Pan in us. We don’t ever really “put away childish things,” we just hide them inside of us.
And that’s the best part of having a grandmother’s attic as part of one’s childhood. The memories of youthful, let’s-pretend days are bound up with the memories of past generations.
We need only to climb a couple of flights of stairs to recapture that which wasn’t lost at all, merely hiding.