The flooring in my parents’ house, the house I grew up in, was solid hardwood and the color of sand. As a child, I would occupy my time by sliding in thick socks from the kitchen, to the dining room and living room. All the while twirling and leaping, as if I was USA figure skating champion Nicole Bobek. This drove my mother insane. She worked from home so that she could raise my brother and me, but this also meant that a quiet work environment was out of the question. We (my brother and I) once started a mini rock band with the kitchen pots, we accidently painted on our bedroom walls, played ferocious games of hide and seek tag, and dug holes in the back garden deep enough that we could stand up to our waists in the muddy-mess. We were far from tyrants, but we were eight (myself) and six, and I’d like to use the word curious to describe us, my mother would probably not.

It was a rainy day and my brother and I were under strict orders not to make a mess around the house. My parents had been cleaning the entire weekend so that we would be ready for a home-showing the following Wednesday evening. My brother and I loved this house and we didn’t want to leave, so we had been sabotaging the cleaning all weekend long. It was now Wednesday and I was feeling like one of the children in “The Cat and the Hat”. I remember my mother was in the living-room, working from home on her computer and my father had just came home from work and was in the garage cleaning his bike.

Since both of the prison wardens seemed to be off duty, my brother and I began to play a game of hide-and-seek tag. I went first and hid under the stairs, in a small crawl space that was filled with old junk and spiders. When it was my brother turn to hide, I counted to one hundred then began to search. Since he was pretty young, it was usually easy to find my brothers hiding spots; behind a curtain, under the bed, in a closet, typical places. But this time I really was having trouble finding him, I had spent about twenty minutes searching all over the house (it was a big house) and had recovered no sign of him. Starting to become worried, I was calling out his name to tell him the game was over, and that was when I heard it.

A muffled sound, sort of like the croak of a frog or the whimpering of a dog…but it was coming from the roof! I walked in circles to pinpoint the exact location of the noise, and it seemed to be coming from our coat closet. By now my mother had heard the commotion and came upstairs to see what all the fuss was about. She opened the closet door and then froze, “what is it?” I asked peering from behind her legs. It was my brother, or part of him at least, dangling through a hole in the ceiling. Now I could hear the voice clearly “help me” he was whimpering and he kept kicking his legs back and forth as if he was trying to stay afloat in water. I was instructed to run downstairs and get my father and his ladder. But when my dad made it upstairs, he was sans ladder. There was no ladder and no step-stool high enough to reach my brother, we would have to go in through the attic, the genius hiding place that had gotten my brother into this mess in the first place.

My father climbed up into the attic but was unable to reach my brother. The wooden beams that supported most of the ceiling ended feet away from him and the only thing to support the weight would be the dry wall of the ceiling. After that my mother had called the firemen, but it was a small town and the firemen were out helping another family. “You’re our top priority Mam” the dispatcher had said but it looked like it would be a while until someone arrived to help. Luckily, my brother was not in pain, he was more scared of the dark attic then the fact that half his body was dangling in mid-air. Since my mother and I were lighter than my dad, we went up to the attic and sat on a sturdy beam, my mother told stories to comfort my brother and I told him about all the rats that probably lived up here. Finally my father and two firemen arrived and a ladder and saw were used to bring my brother down to solid ground. When the firemen left, my brother was examined completely by my mother and I was sent to my room. I didn’t get any desert with dinner that night but we did cancel the showing of the house, and fourteen years later the house is still a place I can call home.