I wake up facing the back wall of the loft. The smell of old pee and woodsmoke rests against the floor alongside me. Warm and sweaty, all covers kicked off, my sisters are asleep and boring. I crawl over to Dawn and put my face in hers. I say her name five times. In her face. I poke her cheek. She paws my hand and rolls over. I hear my parents doing parent things. I don’t know what. Clank and voices; movement and creaking boards. I am eight and my sisters are seven and five.
I crawl on my knees, across rough barn boards to the ladder, avoiding the long, open side of the loft and the giant, rough ropes, snaking lazily between the wide wood posts. I have to pee but I hate running outside because it’s cold and the outhouse is creepy and dark. I do it anyway. Up the short step, past hot stove, through front door, bare feet chilled across rough porch boards, and down three open steps. I wonder what could grab me from under the porch. I smell the woodsmoke strongly, cold sneaks onto my nose as I run up the short hill, up three steps and into the outhouse. It’s dark and smells musty. A bag of chalky lime slouches beside me; afterwards, a handful of lime covers the ghost of poo and pee. I don’t like sitting over that dark hole.
I run into the house and begin to walk towards the clothes room, a dark, crowded space beneath Mommy and Daddy’s loft but stop. I decide to hang out near the wood stove, its smoke-belching pipes and glossy, brown boxy body squatting just inside the front door. I love the smell of smoke and standing here near the stove, it’s big form comforting and dangerous.
My parents loft is separate from ours with a wall in between. We have a ladder that we climb up to get to our loft from the living room. They have a ladder too but it’s wide and it’s leaned so that you can climb up it like steep stairs.
Before we moved into this house we lived in the trailer that Nana and Grandpa live in now at the top of the hill. It has two bedrooms and a narrow, dark hallway that has a washer and dryer in it and a bathroom in between. I remember taking a shower in there when I was little. After my bath, Mommy and Daddy were going to take a shower. I was standing there drying off and they were standing beside me. It was a tiny space and right in front of my eyes were Mommy’s dark curly private place and Daddy’s funny looking private place. I felt squeezed in there and stuck in the middle.
I finish warming up near the stove and know that I have to go get my clothes. I walk into the clothes room, dark and crowded with dressers and hanging clothes. My dresser is the dark one beside the partially covered window. I can read a little bit and I can’t stop my eyes from reading the big sticker on my dresser even though it makes me scared. It reads “Spirit of ‘76.” I open my crowded drawer, jammed closed with so many bulky things, and pick out my underwear and a shirt and a pair of pants. I know that there are the spirits of dead people in the room with me. I feel like they are in the hanging clothes or in the corner between two dressers, or in the little space under my parents ladder stairs.
The cabin I grew up during grades 1-3 (ages 8-10), was one my parent built. The kids sleeping space was a narrow, open-sided loft overlooking the small kitchen, dining room, living room area. At the end of our loft, on the other side of the wall, my parents had an enclosed loft. Under my parents loft bedroom was our family closet with 3-4 dressers and a small hanging clothes area. In that dim space, lit by a single window, I always felt a little frission of something dangerous or unknown. I’d rush in and grab what I needed and run back out.
In my dad’s very 60s style of child-rearing, he assumed we all would grow up well regardless of what kind of guidance or lack of guidance they provided and, in that wisdom, had taken us to a drive-in theatre where the first show, a kid-friendly something that I forgot, was followed by the night show of a horror film called “Ruby”. It was about a terrifying, bloody, vindictive spirit who killed those who had done her wrong.
One of the stickers on my dresser, the only one I remember, said “Spirit of ‘76” and I imagined a specte
r hanging there and watching me. I could feel their invisible eyes and knew they hovered there to spy and creep. Under the stairs and loft, that frightening unknown person dwelled in the corners and watched me grab underwear, pants and shirt and run like heck for the living room.
Thanks for a thorough physical and emotional description of setting...very alive with the kind of memory wrinkles we keep tucked, literally, in the body.