Attic: (n) a space or room just below the roof of a building.
I grew up in a two-bedroom house with a mother, father and four brothers.
If you’re wondering if the space provided failed to meet the requirements of the number suggested, you would be absolutely right.
So as a young boy, I was always looking for new places to go, which I felt provided me opportunities to escape the common cloister.
First was our garage, which was very tiny–not large enough to hold a car and a lawn mower.
We had a huge back yard, which was very nice, but my father had haphazardly planted trees, which were now growing everywhere, making it somewhat impossible to find any space for an actual playground.
There was one enclosure of solitude: our attic.
To get to this room, you had to pull down a set of wooden stairs in the ceiling of our garage, climb up carefully and wiggle through the tiny hole into a space about twice the size of the interior of a car. Our house was not insulated, so as soon as you got up into that territory, you were either freezing in the winter or boiling in the summer.
I didn’t care. I liked to go up there and look through the stuff.
Then one day I realized that I was not surrounded by treasures, but rather, rejects–items which were no longer found worthy to co-exist with the mortals.
- Maybe they were outdated.
- Maybe they were ugly.
- Maybe they had worn out their usefulness.
But mostly they were abandoned.
Pictures, frames, papers and periodicals, periodically boiling and freezing.
After a while, I got depressed being up there. I had this strange sensation that someone would come, pull up the ladder and close me in, deeming it necessary to have one less person in the house and deciding that I was more suited for the rejects on high.
It spooked me.
I know that Anne Frank once found solace in an attic, but for me it was merely a reminder that when people get tired of things, deciding to hoard, they take them to a place where they’re out of the way … and soon forgotten.
Thank you for enjoying Words from Dic(tionary) — J.R. Practix
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WITHIN
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