the disappointed attic

My throat is raw from inhaling insulation dust as I tromped around the office's third floor this morning rearranging the boxes of closed files. The "attic" of this old well-to-do-family-home-long-ago-turned-office is actually the remnants of a finished apartment...and a lovely apartment it was, once upon a time. It has little low windows and little low doors, hobbit-sized, though not round, with high ceilings with trapezoidal arches. The bathroom, where we currently store our old files, was bright and stylish in the sixties, with a wavy glass panel in the wall leading out to the hall, bright orange paint, and orange-striped blinds.

Such a once-adorable, happy little place...that some idiot back in the day hacked apart to install a cooling system right in the floors.

Every time I'm up there I have to tamp down a quick boil of rage. I want to find the person who did such needless violence to this house and shoot him. I hate the way the apartment was raped for cheap modernization -- what wasted space! What a horrendous atrocity! Because the apartment remembers being happy. It remembers being full of light, it remembers people laughing and loving and fighting and hating and dreaming and fearing and hoping within its old walls. And every time I go up there after a file, picking my way through demolition debris, plaster dust, broken glass and insulation, the walls reach out to smother me with their sadness. The apartment wants to love and be loved again. And no one goes up there anymore but me and occasionally my boss.

It makes me want to cry for it, this forlorn little space with giant ducts rearing up and plunging back down through its floors writhing and twisting like serpents, chewing through the boards. It wasn't meant to sit empty. (I wonder if this is something of what haunting really is -- not so much the spirits of the dead, but strong place-memory? Hm.)

But nothing can be done except sweep up some of the insulation and move things around to accommodate records of brief periods of people's lives...and carry around a sore throat the rest of the day.

On a happier note, the Yard of Oddities next door to the office boasts a resident groundhog which I saw do a slip-'n'-slide rolling tumble down the wadded up old wading pool before it hustled in its awkard, rippling run under a bush. I couldn't tell if he were embarrassed or laughing. I was most certainly laughing.