As a youngster, I played in the cellar house, which is a storage room built above a cellar. Ours had a tin roof and white siding, perched on the hillside above my grandparents’ house. Full of cast-off furniture and boxes, it sometimes became my shelter.
Sequestered in the small room, I shut out family quarrels, or escaped the teasing of older cousins.
To one side sat an old trunk with a collection of Mutt and Jeff comic books and my dad’s army uniform. At the bottom lay a woolen patchwork quilt. Pieced by my grandmother, she had used materials saved from sensible overcoats, building a durable but scratchy cover.
In the middle of the room was an iron bedstead that had belonged to my great-grandparents. Atop the bed was a feather tick mattress stuffed with duck feathers and down.
I’d run and plunge into the mattress that was puffed high on the iron bed like a loaf of yeast bread. I’d sink into its soft center and be startled for a few seconds, thinking there was no bottom. Then I’d pull that scratchy quilt up over me and hope for a summer thunderstorm.
On days that a storm brewed, the wind blew and trees limbs creaked. Faintly, I’d hear the approach of thunder, sounding like the rumble of men’s voices drifting from the porch on a hot summer night. Then the booms deepened and rattled the glass in the windows. Lightning flashed so bright I can see it through my closed eyelids. Swaddled in ticking and wool, I was safe.
Rain began with a hesitant patter building on a wilding wind. Deeper I sank into the feather tick.
Then suddenly the wind calmed; the rain settled to serious business hammering the tin roof: in my imagination it became a torrent sluicing through the ceiling, down through wool and flesh and bone, bearing traces of me through feather mattress and iron—finally it splashes to the cellar below.
There, like a river, it flows by spider webs and jars of beans and corn; sweeps onto the concrete floor, passes under walls, seeps out into the dark, rich soil.
It streams by the earthworms and moles, gathering into the water table, the source of our drinking well. Then my family would draw the cold, pure water up in a tin bucket, slip the dipper in, slake their deep thirst.
In the stillness that followed the storm, I clambered out of my refuge, threw open the door, and inhaled the ozone. I listened. Faintly at first, then louder and louder, the cries of the peepers chorused up from the rain-swollen creek. They sang out: I am still here. I am here.