The hidden room

A wooden staircase led to an unfinished basement in our Lake Oswego house. In the basement was the laundry room, a door about halfway up a concrete wall that led to a dirt-floored crawl space under the house, and a wooden door with an old-fashioned wooden latch. Tommy and I had explored the crawl space with a flashlight and found nothing interesting. But we had never opened the wooden door. What was in there? We had to find out. There was no handle, so I lifted the latch and pulled it towards me. The latch had been attached to the door with a leather thong, and the ancient leather gave way when I pulled. Standing there with the latch in my hand, I saw that the door had been nailed shut. This door must hide truly important treasures. We got our dad to help us pull the rusty old nails out. With a crowbar, dad pried the door open. The room emitted a damp, cool, musty breath.
We peered into the dark space, holding our breaths. In the flashlight’s beam we beheld a thick curtain of white cobwebs hanging from a low ceiling. I shrieked and hid behind dad as he used a broom to clear the cobwebs, revealing a small room lined with wooden shelves. On the shelves sat row upon row of jars, some empty and some filled with gray globes that had once been fresh peaches or tomatoes. Someone had carefully peeled and canned all this fruit, then stored the jars in this dark place and abandoned them. Why? The room was silent and we could find no other clues about who had last opened it, or when they’d nailed it shut.
Dad said we could use the room for a hideout. It had no light, not even a bare bulb, so he drilled holes in the door in a large circle like a clock. I collected the cores from that drilling project: sturdy wooden spools that I shellacked and strung on a length of jute and wore like a string of pearls. Tommy and I played in the hideout a few times but grew tired of it; eventually mom cleaned it out and filled it with the glass jars of cherries, peaches, and applesauce that she canned each summer.

The Moon

A chunk of pitted, dusty rock orbits our planet. Its face is turned perpetually toward us, hidden and re-revealed in a performance that is repeated every 28 days, like a curtain being opened and closed on a pale singer in the middle of a dark, empty stage. The moon slides across the night sky, slave to a force beyond our reach, persuading the ocean to attend to its twice-daily ritual cleansing. At a closer distance, deep valleys, rocky mountain ridges, stunningly steep cliffs, and ancient plains emerge. The features are blurred, covered with a gritty blanket of ground-up comets and meteors and other space-borne flotsam. This is a wild country, mostly unexplored or trodden upon by curious travelers. But one site bears the marks of a human visit: there stands an American flag, stiffly at attention for all time, surrounded by deep fence-rail footprints and tracks made by a lunar dune buggy. Bold voyagers placed it there, marking the achievement of a challenge set by a young president. Now, nearest to us in the heavens but still so far, far away, the moon accompanies us in silence through the cold airless galaxy.

The Hope Diamond

This rock is old, a lump of carbon pressed together for millennia with a blue mineral called boron. Dug from the ground in India in the 17th century, it was once nearly three times larger, but no one could afford a diamond that big. It was carved into a 44-carat round, faceted marvel in the 18th century. Once owned by Louis Quatorze and passed down to be worn by Marie Antoinette, the diamond is the color of a midnight summer sky, Elizabeth Taylor’s eyes, the deep Sargasso Sea, a calm calving glacier. Shine an ultraviolet light on it, and the diamond glows, bold blood-red. Now it sits, encircled in white diamonds on a diamond-crusted chain, on a blue velvet perch in a big glass case in a large museum in an Eastern city. To see it, you must wait in line behind hundreds of curious folks who got there before you. You will have a few seconds to take in its grandeur before a uniformed guard ushers you away. In those seconds, imagine hefting the necklace, opening its strong clasp, placing it around your neck and wearing it while you burp the baby or vacuum the carpet or load the dishwasher. Isn’t it splendid? Doesn’t it convert the most quotidian task into an act of significance? Don’t you wish you could keep it? Alas, here in the museum the diamond must remain, far from human toil and triumph, never again to grace the slender neck of an heiress or a queen.