The Attic

The house my family lived in was built in the early 1700’s by a Nantucket whaler for his family. It was large and impressive and built to withstand the raging storms, which periodically swept the Island each winter. It had nooks and crannies unimaginable in houses built in this modern day and it was great fun for my brothers and sisters and me to explore.

There was one place in this house that far surpassed the rest of the house for my siblings and me. This place was the attic. We children appropriated the top story of this sturdy old house as our own domain. It was redolent with the smells of long forgotten trunks, acrid and musty, which were filled with treasures of a different age. The quality of dust-filtered sunlight streaming through windows lent an air of genteel neglect I always imagined the surviving plantations of the south must emit. This wonderful attic was ours. No one could hear us or see us there. We could look out the windows and watch the vital hustle and bustle of the world as though we were watching a silent film. The silence insulated us from the world below; it muffled harsh reality and created a rich sense of peace. It helped us give life to the ghosts of the people who had inhabited this home in the generations preceding our own.

We could imagine the wife of a whaling captain who daily climbed the ladder-like stair that led up from the attic to the roof-walk. Perched close to the chimney on the roof the walk held her as she searched the horizon for any sign of her husband’s return from years of chasing the great mammals of the sea for the oil, which was used to light the lamps of their world. Her daily sojourn to be rewarded finally, with the sight of his ship’s flag signaling that another Nantucket whaler is home safe from searching the seas.

There were the children of a young Quaker family playing among themselves in their somber clothing. As they learned their lessons dutifully and did their chores we imagined their conversations studded with the thee’s and thou’s used by those of their faith.

Also there was the ghost of a spinster lady who lived here in the 1800’s who, it is said, still roams these rooms searching for the lover who never came home from the sea.

The possibilities were limited only by our imaginations, colored and fleshed out by the stories we heard from our grandfather, about the history of our very special Island and, in particular, this very special house.

We could be up there for hours, especially on rainy days when we weren’t able to play outside. The neighborhood children would all come and play in our glorious attic playhouse. We would dress up and become the people we imagined, hold puppet shows, stage plays, tell stories or just sit quietly and read.

Reading was my favorite thing to do there; I would slip up to this oasis of calm in our very busy household filled with the sounds and activity of my brothers and sisters in the floors below and settle down with a beloved book. While the rain beat a soft drumbeat on the roof, I could be alone, swept away by some grand adventure that awaited me between the pages of one of my grandfather’s books about Nantucket and our ancestors who settled this Island and made it home.

In all the years we lived in that house there was never a time when the attic wasn’t the perfect place to be. It was a clubhouse, a reading room, an art room or a schoolroom. It was a place where we could be alone if we chose, a place for quiet reflection or daydreaming, a private place all our own which kept us safe from the outside world.

In my mind’s eye I still go back to that place when the sun’s rays create a certain mote-filled pattern or when a smell evokes the musty attic. When the rain beats a familiar tapping on a roof or when an irregularity in a pane of glass reminds me of those ancient panes in the windows of that attic, I am there again. It is as it always was, a lovely place to visit, as vivid today as it ever was in my childhood. When I am caught unaware and transported back to the place where I spent so many pleasant hours, I am thankful for the memory and I look forward to my visits to that attic, still.

Dee Kniskern.....Nantucket Native

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