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“Have you not wondered at our extreme difficulty in finding our way around?...Time after time we choose the wrong doors, the room we want eludes us.”—Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House. My house has rooms that play hide and seek with me. Rooms that are so obvious from the outside of the house. One has floor-to-ceiling bay windows and the other, literally projects off the house, having once been a large balcony. Yet, once inside, the house hides them. I remember when we first moved in, I often found myself walking in circles looking for a room I couldn’t find, but knew was there. An unsettling feeling, especially for a new mother. Imagine, for a moment, the idea of feeling lost at home. Yet, I’ve never felt frightened, for unlike Hill House with dark, snaring intentions, my home merely teases me like a capricious child. It’s like this—up the turning stairs, a narrow passageway branches off the main corridor and leads to my writing room. Beyond, the little hall opens to an alcove with a long, mullioned window. This nook deceives me into thinking it’s a dead end. From the hallway, the room is hidden from view, until I round the corner and step deeper into the alcove. Sometimes, I still get tingles of excitement when I find it. The other room that likes to hide has a door that’s tucked from view. At the top of the stairs, I have to turn completely around and duck into yet another nook in order to find the room. Even with the door open, the room is not immediately apparent from the main hallway. And when the door is closed, it feels like the room has disappeared. Despite living in the house for six years, there are rare moments when this room still catches me by surprise. When this happens, I find myself laughing out loud, and it echoes through the hall as if the house laughs with me. “Gotcha!” this 183-year-old prankster seems to say. Today, in the passageway outside my writing room, gleeful light streams through the mullioned window and casts a bright, toothy grin on the floor.
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