“The past is an old armchair in the attic, the present an ominous ticking sound, and the future is anybody’s guess.” — James Thurber

It struck me tonight that there is a part of my childhood home where I never went. We had an attic–well, one of those storage areas between the ceiling and the roof, not a real attic with stairs and trunks of old clothes and family secrets. Just a square part of the roof in the hallway, right before you got to my bedroom. Dad would put a ladder beneath that square, pushing it away to reveal a hole in the ceiling, and then he would disappear.

The house I grew up in was not large. Our family was just Mom, Dad, me, and our pets (cats, for the most part, with comparatively brief, but nonetheless important, appearances by a parakeet, a hamster, and a rabbit). We didn’t need much room. The house was a one-story house that had probably been built in the 1960s. We had a living room we rarely used (except later when we got a piano, Dad would sometimes sit on the couch and listen as I practiced), a kitchen we always used, with a dining room attached, a den/family room that saw the most use, a guest room, my room, and my parents’ room. A one-car garage was attached to the kitchen side. And we had a large backyard with a giant oak tree and fruit trees that lined one side. A screened-in back porch. A shed out back.

I can vividly remember almost every inch of that house. I lived there from the time I was seven until I went away to college. My parents moved from the house to a townhouse across Titusville during my second year of college, at which point my grandparents lived in the house (”The Ponderosa,” we called it, after the street it was located on). My grandfather died in what used to be my bedroom.

So it is an odd feeling to realize that I never once peered into the attic. I have no picture for what it looked like. I have no memory of it. It’s as if it didn’t exist. But it did, and from time to time Dad disappeared into it, bringing down a box of this or that, Christmas lights or old stuffed animals.

I’ll never see that part of the house. It was sold years ago. I haven’t seen the house itself in a long time, haven’t driven by to see what trees are still there. Part of me doesn’t want to see it now, doesn’t want to look at the grass Dad always kept so neat and so green. I don’t want see the sidewalk that snaked up to our front door, the path where my black and white cat Pepper used to lay, sunning himself. I would see luminaries on Christmas Eve, those white paper bags with their candles burning. I would see the green and pink splotches on the driveway where I dropped the paper bunny I had decorated in first grade, its still-wet paint leaving marks that never washed off, no matter how much rain we got.

My whole childhood is there, in that house. And what is in the attic? What did we keep there? And what is there now? What parts of us stayed in the walls of that house, in its paint, in the tile floor? What parts stayed, and what parts are gone forever?

A man died in that house before we moved there. His last name was Pie, and I used to imagine the house was haunted by him, though I never had any real experience to back that up. There was nothing left of him, as far as I could tell, no shadows of the time he spent in the house that was now mine. No echoes. He was just gone. I never knew what he looked like.

One year, Dad replaced the cabinets and countertop in the kitchen, and when he tore away the old cabinets, we found half of a book behind them, pressed up against the wall. It had been a paperback, a romance or a mystery. I couldn’t figure out how it had gotten there, behind those cabinets. I knew it must have been a message, but I never could decipher what it meant.