Mourning the loss of attics

Storage units are sterile, attics have ghosts.

One of the charms of any old house is the attic. Oh, to sort through an old attic, musty and hot in the summer, cold and creaky during winter, stacked with boxes and antiques.

Things you might find in an attic: Baseball cards worth thousands. Old love letters and boxes of photos. A broken spinning wheel. Relics which somebody way back just couldn’t put in the garbage pit.

When I was a child, our attic was the upstairs of an old granary.

About once per summer, I crawled up the steep permanent ladder, balanced myself on the loose plank floor, and dug for buried treasure.

Cobwebs, dust and bat droppings covered the boxes. The summer sun made the dirty four-pane window in the granary’s peak glow with enough light to read by.

Like the rings of a tree, the most recent additions to the attic were closest to the surface. Tax returns, bills, receipts from the past decade, nothing of any interest. To get to the good stuff, you had to dig a bit.

Digging deeper was dangerous. The “floor” of the attic was actually a collection of loose planks and plywood thrown over the granary’s rafters. To dig deeper, I had to slide the planks around and test them with my weight. Stepping on a poorly balanced plank meant a ten-foot fall to the floor with a two-by-twelve plank following close behind.

But what treasure! Mom and Dad’s high school yearbooks were good for an hour of snooping. An old mantle clock brought over from Sweden by my great-grandmother in the 1890s was a real find. Getting it down the ladder was a major victory.

My grandmother hoarded all of her correspondence in the attic. I found letters from the 1910s and 1920s, all written in Swedish. I didn’t dare ask Grandma to translate them as she didn’t care to be reminded of a past which, to her, was nothing but poverty and hardship.

I uncovered two ancient photo albums with wooden pages and a metal clasp which bound together dim brown images of sober immigrants in their Sunday best circa 1905.

The attic was our family archive, and I was a sleuth digging for clues.

I read the letters written between Grandpa and Grandma before they were married in 1930. Apparently, they liked each other at the time.

Grandpa thought jazz was just the limit. It could lead to dancing! Grandma wrote back that yes, jazz was nothing more than noise.

Some relics grossed me out, such as a love letter written from my father to my mother in which he claims he missed her so much that he spent endless hours staring out the window into the bleak darkness, darkness as empty as his forlorn heart beating in the hollow tomb of his chest.

Yuck.

Houses don’t have attics any more. Even if they did, people move too often to accumulate anything of historic worth. We have storage units, but the contents aren’t as ancient. And what kid would spend an afternoon blissfully lost in old exercise devices?

A storage unit is sterile, but an attic has ghosts.

The closest thing we have to an attic today are old hard-drives. But try to find a computer to open their files!

Fifty years from now, will some curious, nerdy kid browse through Grandpa’s emails and Facebook posts for family secrets? No chance.

All we have now are digital attics, or information floating in “the cloud.” The cloud has no cobwebs, bat droppings or hand-written letters. Most of the information contains too little motherlode to profitably mine.

We take more pictures and send more messages than ever before, but most of it will be lost, and justifiably so. It’s all so much spam.

Attics are well-curated. Somebody decided something had enough worth to keep.

Alas, our old granary was of little use except as a last stop for junk before it was thrown in the woods, or the garbage pit. My unsentimental father had the granary destroyed in 1997, along with the contents of its attic.

Long live the attics which remain!