Day 337: Dreaming in the Attic

When I was a kid, the thing I wanted most in the whole wide world was to travel.

Aside from reading, writing, and drawing, one of my favorite pastimes was sitting in the attic, making collages from old National Geographic magazines and dreaming of places I’d never been but planned to visit.

The attic wasn't furnished – or rather, it was.

It just wasn't finished.

Our house was almost one hundred years old, and nothing much had been done to improve the attic since the builders – long dead, I’m sure – had packed up their hammers and saws and moved on to their next construction project.

The exposed brick chimney stood in the middle of the room, and the rough, cobwebbed roof joists sloped outward and downward to the dark corners where you could see pink insulation peeping out from behind a misshapen army of boxes and suitcases. The attic floor was made of pallets that my parents picked up for free from behind furniture stores, lugged home atop our ancient station wagon, and dismantled in the backyard. Some of the wood was used for firewood, but the best pieces were nailed together into a tolerable surface so that no one could fall through the ceiling to the rooms below.

I think someone did fall through the hatch once, but I don’t remember who it was.

They were (mostly) okay.

Someone also hung themselves in the basement.

But that was before we moved in.

Dad never told us about the hanging until after we moved out, but it does explain the cold, clammy feeling in the pit of my stomach whenever I raced past the basement door in the middle of the night on my way to the bathroom.

Anyway … we pushed an old wooden desk against the chimney and set up one of those prehistoric manual typewriters – the kind with enough heavy metal to start their own band and moveable arms that swung up from inside and left a faded letter printed on the paper that we hand-cranked, piece by piece, into the typewriter using a knob on the side. We never replaced the ribbon, so the letters got progressively more faded as time wore on, and sometimes the letter arms got stuck together and you had to unstick them and get oil all over your fingers, but at least you never wasted time choosing a font.

Our tiny house was filled to overflowing with life, as our family grew to include eight people, one dog, one cat (and several litters of kittens), two birds, a succession of hamsters, and a tank full of fish that were unfortunate enough to get sucked up into the filter where we didn’t find them until all that was left were their tiny skeletons.

The attic was a pretty nice place to get away from it all. In fact, the attic was so popular that the hatch was always left open and the stepladder beneath it became a permanent fixture.

Even in the heat of the summer, with sweat running down our arms and soaking our hair so that it stuck to our foreheads and the backs of our necks, we played in the attic.

Writing stories.

Trading hockey cards.

Making collages.

Having contests about who could jump over the open hatch … and who couldn’t.

Whoops.

And the dreams that were born in a hot attic, hunched over glue sticks and old magazine clippings, stayed in my heart all through middle school … and high school.

I got a scholarship and made plans to go to university and become a teacher so I could travel all over the world, teaching in different countries, and never staying in one place for more than a few years at a time.

And then I met a man.

Men are game-changers.

We dated for three years, then got engaged.

Several months into our year-long engagement, and only a few months away from my BEd graduation and our wedding, I realized something.

If I got married, my dreams weren't going to come true.

At least not for a long, long time.

It was a dark winter night. Nathan and I were sitting in a parking lot outside New York Fries.

I’d never eaten there before.

I don't plan to eat there again.

We talked.

Should we delay the wedding so I could teach overseas for a year?

If we did, would I come back?

I graduated, a licensed teacher, on July 15^th 2009.

I got married three days later.

I’m glad I did.

Ever since then, the thread that is my life has been winding circles around itself, my days spent wending through the same places, in the same province, in the same city.

Day after day. Layer upon layer.

Growing older but going nowhere in particular.

I’ve worked or interned in every school I ever attended. Elementary school. Middle school. High school. University. I taught in the basement of the church where I got married, and I work in a library with the same (awesome) librarian who was my librarian then and we are separated only by a door from the cafeteria where I held my reception. I live in a house two blocks away from where my grandparents lived almost their whole lives and where my father grew up. I attend the same church and small group as my grade one teacher, whose husband taught my father, whose son taught me, whose grandson I taught in grade 6 during my teaching internship at the same school I attended as a preteen.

The choices I've made have become a big, beautiful knot that ties me here to this place, to these people.

One day, I will get on a plane to visit another country. But it is not this day.

One day, I will visit the Philippines, see the city where I was born, and meet our Compassion child, Johnny. But it is not this day.

One day, I will go to Israel and walk the land that gave birth to my faith. But it is not this day.

One day, I will go on a mission trip, study abroad, or volunteer overseas with an NGO. But it is not this day.

And that is okay.

Because that day will come.

And because I will come back.

The summer I met my husband, I copied this quote into my journal:

“That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day.”

- Charles Dickens (Great Expectations)

I’m glad to say my chain is forged of gold … with a few flowers sprinkled here and there to annoy me. ;)

And I wouldn't trade it for a work visa, a passport full of stamps, or a thousand airplane tickets to anywhere in the world.

**After conferring with my family, we have agreed on the following information**

1. It was John.
2. He fell on Matthew.
3. Matthew was mad, but otherwise okay.