entry ~ cedar closet

(February, 2012: Working on indexing/categorizing pieces I've blogged. Transferring this piece from my once-public blog, versions.)

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November 24, 2009

Visiting the house Sunday.  I'm not sure how to describe it - sobering maybe?  Sobering as far as life changes, growing older.  Seasons.

I walked each room.

The room that affected me most was the closet upstairs.  It's a cedar closet; I'm pretty sure it's cedar.  Seems I would know something like that.

The closet is in an eave of the house, under the sharp-pitched 1930's roof.  It's a walk-in closet.  I wonder if Mom and Dad had it made after they bought the house?  It seems odd a late '30s house would have a walk-in closet.  As long as I can recall that closet has been full.  Only after Mom died and we cleaned out the house have I, to my conscious knowledge, ever seen its real shape and the walls.

There is a light bulb in the socket in the ceiling of the closet.  The bulb is exposed, there is no decorative cover.  A string that hangs down controls the on/off.

I pull the string and there is light. For some reason I feel an almost-terror sensation.

I notice the pitch of the ceiling and the enclosed built-in bench-like seat-shelf structures on each side of the closet running its length from entry door to the back wall. Steel rods hang on hooks that are attached to the ceiling with what appears to be make-shift rods.

I walk to the back of the closet.

I have had repeated dreams over the past 10ish years about this closet.  In my dream, the back wall  has a door that leads to a secret part of the house.  The secret area is large and has corridors.  Often in my dream, I will know I'm dreaming, but will tell myself that I know this place and have been here in real life before.

I have dreamed  a lot about houses since the late 90s. There is most always a part of the house that is unused, that I know exists, that I know I must at some point "get to." The houses are usually large in my dreams, and often it is the same house.  I could draw a picture of the one often-dreamed-about house, with its gardens and auditorium, spiral mahogany staircase, hallways upstairs, lush bathrooms with skylights.  In my dream I don't live in the rich part of the house, but rather in the dingy part which is downstairs.  Oh yes, there is also the underground part of the house.  I've not discovered much about it, but I know it is there. It has wide white high-ceilinged hallways; they slope downward and are never ending.

I stand in the closet  this past Sunday and I cry.  I feel creepy and like it was a torture closet.  I walk to the back and on the wall (where in my dream the door to the secret part is located) is a board that has been secured like it is covering up a breach or something. The secured board is about three-and-a-half feet tall and is the width of the closet, from bench seat to bench seat.  My dream comes to mind; however, I know that in reality beyond that board is insulation, 2X4s and then probably the chimney.  If not the chimney, then the outside brick wall.

I look at the bench seats and imagine dead people in them; their height and width are the size of caskets and totally encased.  Carol, you've watched too many movies, I sarcastically tell myself.

I later wonder why I had such a reaction in that closet. Perhaps I used to hide in there when I was little.

Perhaps I used to imagine monsters in the closet.  Perhaps I used to think of Edgar Allan Poe's stories that my father used to read to us kids when I was little.  Perhaps I imagined that closet as a place where inanimate dolls would come alive and do evil things; it seems when I was young that I watched one Alfred Hitchcock epidose where that happened. Perhaps I used to hide in the closet when Daddy would go into a rage.

I must ask my older siblings at Christmas, "Are there family secrets that I don't know about?"

I doubt it.  Probably just my wild and vivid imagination.

Still. I don't like the feeling I had as I stood in that closet.

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