Beginnings

I was walking home from school, up the steep driveway, towards the very large and very old house that we shared with two other faculty families. Before, we had lived in a very large and very old faculty house all to ourselves. I don't remember, or perhaps never knew, why we had to leave it. It was a lot more fun. It had once been owned by a woman who put a large vat filled with sand in the attic to catch an atomic bomb when it fell. She was perhaps not so eccentric as one might think — those were also the days when we had to practice ducking under our classroom desks as preparation for a nuclear attack. The sand-filled vat was still in the house — an attraction that my brother and I would escort our friends to the attic to admire. The bedrooms had built-in closets with large drawers at the bottom. My friend Eleanor and I would amuse ourselves by pulling out the closet drawers in adjoining rooms and then peering at each other through the open hole in the wall. My older brother George was convinced that the house was a station on the Underground Railroad, the escape route for former slaves, and I once caught him (and promptly told our mother) dismantling the fireplace to find irrefutable evidence for his claim…