keep it like a secret.

I remember it clearly as if it were yesterday, and not some fifteen years ago. I remember being led to the closet in the bedroom with the orange carpet, it may have been my bedroom at the time, by my older brother. I remember him telling me that there was a secret inside there, a wonderful secret that I was to tell no one about. I remember it all vividly, in technicolor, because that really is the only way to remember the carpet in that room.

Of course, I don't actually remember which brother it was, but that's not important.

I think it was Knocker, because it seems like more of a Knocker incident. My other brother Barry would not have been living at home at the time, and incidents with my brother Sid usually ended up with me having some sort of injury. So we'll go with Knocker. Knocker showed me things like how to play chess or how to make chocolate chip cookies with the piano, which is the real reason I was upset that Mama gave the piano to my sister Carla. She probably doesn't even know how to make chocolate chip cookies with it.

And now at the risk of betraying Knocker and the wonderful secret in the closet, I'm going to tell everyone what it is. If you go into that closet, there is a ledge on the left, a ledge that is covered in more technicolor orange carpet. In the back right corner of that ledge, there is a patch of that carpet that is loose, cut away so that you can pull up a little flap and see the wood underneath. In that wood, there is a little tiny trapdoor, maybe four inches square, that you can lift up and find a little cubby hole, a secret hiding place for a child's worldly treasures.

Secret hiding places are wondrous things. I wasn't a very secretive kid; I spilled the beans on Daddy's surprise birthday present one year. But I kept the secret of the cubby hole to myself all these years. It was like a sacred place, somewhere that we kids could keep things from our parents. Not that I really had anything important to hide, but if I did and it was less than four inches cubed in volume, I knew where to keep it.

I remember keeping a little book in there, a tiny Snoopy notebook with a tiny pencil that went with it. It was technically my sister's, and since I don't really recall her actually giving it to me, it may have been a hot notebook. I think I claimed it as mine after she left it in the same place for a very long time, clearly giving up rights to it. I must have kept it there to hide it from her, because I knew my rights to it were a little sketchy. The fact that I was using the hole to hide things from her maybe means that every kid in my family didn't know about the cubby. Or maybe I just didn't think of the possibility that she knew it was there.

I think about the secret hiding place every once in a while, and happened to think about it this weekend when I was at home. I took a flashlight into the closet and cleared the area above the cut away carpet and looked inside. It was empty. I don't suppose I'd put anything in there for years. I don't even remember what happened to the notebook or any of the other things I kept in there.

And then it hit me, a thought that would never have entered the mind of the little girl who had a secret hiding place, but came obviously to the twenty-one year old that I am now. Mama and Daddy had to have known about it. They built this house, and they had to have known all along. There was no way that one of my brothers sidled up to the builders all those years ago and slyly asked them to add this little hole to the blueprints, slipping them a dollar or two.

So I showed it to Mama, who was amazed. She either had never known, or had forgotten she had known. She showed it to Daddy, who said that it seemed like he had known about it at some point but had also forgotten about it. Neither of them know why it is there.

And now I have betrayed my secret, the one I kept for all these years. I have destroyed any hope my siblings ever had of hiding a four inch by four inch by four inch secret in my parents' house, right under their very noses. I hope Knocker isn't angry with me. Or whichever brother it was.