A delivery van pulls into the drive. The driver leaves a large box on your stoop. You take it inside, remove the packaging, and inside is another box, with no identifying marks, no seams, and seemingly no means of opening it. It’s a Puzzle Box!
That’s how the movie, GLASS ONION, begins.
I just love a good ol’ “who/howdunnit” but life is pretty unerringly dull in my world. So just to add spice, I try to build a world, a set, in which these sorts of adventures could happen.
I think I was inspired by my grandparents’ house. Theirs was a small craftsman that looks, inside and out, pretty modest. Center entry into a living room, bedroom 1 on the left. Doorway into the kitchen with bedroom 2 on the left. But between the kitchen and that bedroom was a small door that led to stairs to the attic – a big attic. Under those stairs was a closet/passage that connected both bedrooms. To a small child discovering this while looking for Christmas presents, it was a gothic castle!
Maybe when I’m dead and gone, my family will be mildly entertained by the many little secrets and cubbies I’ve managed to create and install – some of which they know about, some they may find later… or not. Those of us who were born in the computer game era will know them as “easter eggs”. Those are the little surprises you find when you shift your focus and see a thing from a different perspective.
Thus, today, I’m sharing just a couple of my “secret spaces/hidden places.” You may have seen in some of the earlier, mid-renovation pictures of my library that I have/had a secret bookshelf door. Well, It’s about to be past tense. The one I have turns out to be very inconvenient for things like egress/aggress. Not my intention.
My favorite hidey holes are my puzzle boxes. Okay, they were given to my kids who allowed them to collect dust and never used them. (I found a $20 bill in one of them in a drawer that my daughter forgot about. Yes, I returned her twenty.)
And then, there are the ones that are hidden in plain sight. The book boxes disguise themselves nicely on my now Spartan bookshelves. Yes, I keep very interesting stuff in each of them. Not.
So the next time you’re pondering the notion of someday owning a house with lots of secret passages, like in a toasty mystery, you could pick up a good book and transport yourself, or you could look around your home and think about some of those nooks and crannies that we forget about – the ones you only see when you shift your focus.
