A young couple hired me to reroof the old house they had just bought here in Wausau. The shingles were curling and it had started leaking, and the place had not had a new roof in about three lifetimes. Tearing off an old roof, you find layers, and this one had three, folks just shingling right over the old instead of stripping it. So I am peeling it back, layer by layer, and I get to a spot up near the peak, over where there used to be a dormer window. Somebody had framed that old window shut years back, boarded it over and roofed right across the top of it, so from outside you would never know a window had ever been there.
And behind those boards, in the closed-off space that used to be the dormer, tucked up under the roofline where nobody would ever go, there was something. You would only ever find it doing exactly what I was doing, tearing the whole roof off and opening up that sealed nook.
A person boards up a window sometimes, sure. But they do not usually hide something in the cavity when they do it. There was years of dust and bird nests up in there, undisturbed, and sitting in the middle of all of it was a thing that had no business being under anybody roof. I pried the last of the boards loose, got a good look into that dark little space, and I backed down toward my ladder and hollered for the couple in the yard, because they needed to see this with their own eyes.
It was a childs whole secret world. A little nook, just big enough for a small person to curl up in, and somebody long ago had made it a hideaway. A wooden crate for a table. A stub of candle. A stack of storybooks swollen with damp. A cigar box of treasures, the kind a child counts as riches, bottle caps and marbles and a blue jay feather and a foreign coin. Crayon drawings still pinned to the rafters, a whole gallery of them, faded but there.
I tracked down who lived in that house the longest, back and back, and it led me to a woman in her eighties two towns over. When I told her what I found sealed up in the roof, she started to cry before I even finished.
It had been hers. She grew up in that house, one of seven kids in a loud hard house, and that little dormer nook up under the roof had been the one place in the whole world that was hers alone, where she read and drew and hid from the noise and dreamed. When she was near grown, her father boarded the drafty dormer over for the winter, with all her treasures still tucked inside, and she never got them back.
She came to see it. Eighty-some years old, and she stood in that torn-open roof with her hand over her mouth, looking at her own crayon drawings, at the cigar box of a little girl riches, all of it right where she left it seventy years before.
This was the only place that was ever just mine. I thought it was gone forever. You gave me back the one corner of my whole childhood that was happy.
The young couple did not seal it back up. They built a little reading nook right there instead, for their own kids, and the old woman crayon drawings are framed on the wall of it. Some hideaways are meant to be found again.