Christopher Posey

Editing Essentials
Dr. Deaver
January 27, 2014

The Age of Things

Mifflin Street sat in a shadow. It ran narrowly from the dead end at Garfield Elementary

four blocks to the massive structures of the Lebanon Steel Foundry. Along those four blocks

were numerous Depression Era duplexes with the occasional freestanding, single-family home,

usually a Victorian corner house with bay windows and ornate gables or the middle of the block

ranch sitting slightly back from the sidewalk with conifers and shrubs filling the extra space. My

family’s house was one side of a duplex.

The rooms were situated shotgun style. The front door opened into the living room,

which connected to the dining room, which connected to the kitchen. The rear was a postage

stamp backyard and one-car garage on the alley. A staircase ascended to the second floor along

the right side of the living room. It shared its planks with the neighboring house, so that when

the old man next door came went out in the wee hours to go hunting his heavy boot-falls

resounded upon our stairs like the tread of some solemn ghost. But sometimes, in the dark of

night, the footsteps would come up the stairs, and enter my room and cross the floor away

from the shared wall of our two houses. I was sure it wasn’t the old man making ghostly noises

on those nights. It was, after all, an old house.

The exterior of our house was covered in tar-paper shingles with patterned, colored

gravel designs on them, and the interior was bulging and cracked, painted, horse hair plaster.

Skeleton keys opened or locked every door in the four bedroom home, including the one that

led up the cobweb festooned attic where mom kept the clothing and shoes from opposing

1
seasons. She would enlist my brother and me to bring down all her winter clothes and boots in

October, and likewise put all her summer-wear and sandles up in the empty spaces. The whole

process reversed in March. We didn’t like going up there. It was unfinished, full of dancing

motes of dust, and spider communities, it had an air of foreboding made all the worse by the

small twin doors built into either side space. each one under the slanted roof. They were

dwarven thresholds that only latched shut and surely held unknown horrors. The musty

mummies of lost children rested in them I knew without a doubt. The “resident” who walked

through my room when I slept must have known about them, but I couldn’t fathom what the

connection was between them. I just knew that the attic scared me. But the basement was far

more terrifying.

The rough hewn stone walls and bald, yellow light bulbs hanging from the bare beams

supporting the floor above made it appear to my imaginative eyes like the dungeon of some

medieval keep housing armies of goblins and skeleton warriors ready to take up rusty arms

against the world of the living humankind. My parents kept all kinds of things down there

regardless of the risk: snow tires, xmas decorations, the washer and dryer, my father’s tap-

system and the spare kegs, and stacks and piles of tools and materials that never seemed to

find any use whatsoever. Things could hide easily down there, and they did. You could hear

them moving about at night or even in the middle of the day, if it was cold and wet and gray

outside. Sometimes there was breathing too, heavy coughing breaths that came up out of the

cellar door, though my parents pretended not to notice. The “resident” walked around the

house a lot, but never on the cellar stairs. Obviously she didn’t want to go down there either.

Modern homes with their double-insulated windows, and sliding glass doors, wood

2
paneling and granite countertops had game rooms in the basement, with TV’s and Ataris, and

dartboards next to wet bars. My friends lived in joyous seclusion in attic bedrooms painted to

look like outer space with Star Wars posters pinned to the slanted ceilings. Short bookshelves

hid any mysterious doors and thus barred the intrusion of dead bodies. When the winter winds

were exceedingly bitter the cold never invaded their worlds, nor did the swelter of summer

humidity. But newer houses for all their amenities didn’t have any character, they lacked the

important nugget of home...a history. And a resident.