Grandma and Grandpa's Basement.

It’s amazing how comforting repetition can be when you’re a child. Christopher and I could ride circles around the basement on our scooters for hours stopping only to take turns on who got the “good scooter.” When that got old we would make up routines on the mini-tramps that had survived many days of beating. The one warm patch of carpet became as incredible or simple as we imagined it: a schoolroom with perfect order or a chaotic battle zone, a stage for our favorite books or fantasies to come alive, an artist’s studio, a place to take a nap.

Everything we did there was safe because I knew that Grandpa was upstairs watching the news or throwing Gilly’s ball and Grandma was intently reading a mystery novel through her glasses with the long silver chain.

It was a happy and comfortable place because that morning seated on the soft, overstuffed couch I watched Grandpa, in his chair, read the newspaper and drink his orange juice. It was an exciting place because that afternoon Grandma had let us eat lunch at the mall and given me the intoxicating pleasure of picking out one new book (always Nancy Drew – following in my Grandmother’s mystery infatuation) off of the clean, white shelves smelling of new pages and mysteries revealed.

It was a wonderful place because I knew that night I would kiss Grandpa goodnight on his dry pink lips and feel the silver scruffles of his chin on my smooth one. Upstairs, Grandma would let me pick out one favorite stuffed animal and read me a short book by lamplight. I would then be tucked in like no one has ever been tucked before or will ever be tucked again and have my back patted like a pampered princess until I don’t even know that she’s gone and am dreaming of the delicious time I will have tomorrow.

But I awaken now and it is Tomorrow and I am twenty four years old and tears are streaming down my face because of a basement. It is tomorrow and my Nancy Drew books are in a box in the attic. Here in Tomorrow I wake up and listen to the news and drink my orange juice and I crave the aroma of new pages by lamplight. I am intoxicated and overwhelmed by the image of silver chains and silver scruffles and the mystery of love still revealed here, in Tomorrow.