A Cross-Section of my Childhood

My eyelashes brush up against the adjacent planks. My nose presses against splinters. I peer through the slats.

I'm lying face-down on the porch. The floor is raised two or three feet above the ground, creating a dark, enclosed chamber beneath it. Many an object has plummeted through the gaps and into the space below, due to my slippery fingers or inadequate grasp. Since the chamber is inaccessible from the outside, each object remains there forever – frozen in the orientation it fell in, like a person of Pompeii frozen in his dying stance.

I look down. From the mottled patches of light and dark, dirt and leaves below, I can make out plastic combs, grimy crayons, tiny figurines from long ago. The thickness of the layer of dust encasing each one indicates how long it has been trapped there, how long ago it was dropped.

I remember, as a child, what a horrifying phenomenon it was to drop something through the slats. If the object was important – a ring, a set of car keys, my brother's third grade science workbook – we construed hangers and strings to pickpocket the space below. Even though the chances of actually obtaining the object were as slim as the chances of winning an iPod in a claw machine, we still tried. If our hand-eye coordination was exceptionally terrible, we'd pull up the wrong object – a bubble wand instead of a wedding band, a ballpoint pen rather than a golden letter-opener. In that scenario, we'd curse good luck for using itself up on the wrong object, and continue to fish.

I glance from key-chain to fork, from gum wrapper to sticker sheet. The memories rush back. The cartooned face of Hercules stares up at me, from the mud-smeared and faded cover of an old coloring book. A small, plastic pig catches my eye, nestled between mounds of dirt and piles of grime. I smile; I still remember when my brother and I used to collect miniature farm animals from vending machines for a quarter. Greedily counting up our stock, we would then wield armies against each other and play out epic battles of horses and roosters and goats. When the best of warriors suddenly flew from the table and to their demise below, tears and mangled hangers followed.

What a world of memories. A glimpse through these slats is a glimpse into my childhood.

But it is a glimpse unique from any other. Sure, I could slide open, say, a drawer – and gaze at the objects inside, relive the memory attached with each. But those objects represented my childhood quite poorly. They were only the “really nice” objects that my parents had deemed worth keeping: perfectly-formed shells, birthday cards, nice jewelry. The drawers didn't hold the twenty-five cent figurines or grimy crayons that were part of my everyday childhood life. Only the space under the floor held that.

The chamber under the porch is an accurate cross-section of my childhood. The objects and memories there aren't picked or filtered; they're just the unglorified past.

And that's exactly what a memory should be.