The attic thrilled me, though not in the macabre way I allowed the basement to thrill me. The grit caked on the attic's one tiny window allowed only a narrow beam of light, one that turned the attic a warm golden color, a sepia tone so wonderfully appropriate for the resting place of one family's old, forgotten things. Decades piled on top of one another like layers and layers of flesh over a softly beating heart. The attic--hot and airless, with a peaked ceiling and sharply slanting walls, like a giant wooden tent--was a place to inspect things, to turn things over in my hands.

Here were open boxes full of my grandfather's things. Clothing. Records. An old movie recorder, and tin canisters containing reels of silent black-and-white home movies my grandparents had filmed in Alaska and Yellowstone, in the front yard, at the beach.

At the far end of the attic stood a large wardrobe, solid wood, expensive, empty. Grandma told me it had belonged to my grandfather, a man who died only months before I was born. Once, I stood in front of the wardrobe and touched the smooth edges of the doors, opened them, closed them, stroked the worn wood. My grandfather touched this door, right here, right where I'm touching it now.