’ve been a bit nostalgic as my family prepares to sell our parents’ home, where I grew up in North Fairhaven. That involves keeping, selling or giving away the things they accumulated since 1952, plus giving the interior a good scrubbing.
At last month’s estate sale held inside, the most talked-about feature of those who came was the door that doubled as a bookcase. That’s it in the photo above. I so loved that door because it made me feel the house had a secret passageway. Who wouldn’t want to live in a home with one?
When my industrious parents constructed their Cape-style home, they held off having bedrooms in the attic for years. The door they had built blocking the upstairs wasn’t ordinary, however. It was also a bookcase with paneling at the bottom, and if someone didn’t notice the hinges, they wouldn’t think it was a doorway. Very clever.
I always felt this door was one of the best features of our house — along with my father’s gardens, the player piano in the cellar, and a huge genie my mother painted on the wall beside it.
Eventually, the upstairs was finished with an oversized bedroom that has built-in closets and drawers, a den, and a large storage area when our family expanded to four children. We three girls slept upstairs. Our brother had his own room downstairs. The bookcase door was then moved upstairs to seal off a storage area.
Now, the door is back where it was originally installed on the first floor. Old books filled its shelves until they were donated recently.
My fascination with secret passageways was intensified as a kid when I read Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl. This book wasn’t fiction, but a moving account of how Anne’s family and others attempted to survive the Nazi regime in Amsterdam by hiding in the Secret Annex. That doorway also was disguised as a bookcase. Unfortunately it was not enough to keep Anne and the others safe. Our experiences couldn’t have been more different.
During my childhood, I read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Gardenand Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and the entire Wizard of Oz series by L. Frank Baum. There were other books and movies in which people could escape to some place secret and didn’t know what they would find there.
Certainly, such magical realism has inspired my own books for young readers, such as the Twin Jinn Series — the third The Twin Jinn in the Land of Enchantment will be the next release. Then there is The Talking Table, a young adult novel that I’ve been pitching to agents and publishers.
The bookcase door in my parents’ home, alas, didn’t bring me to a magical place each time I opened it. But it certainly kindled my imagination, and I thank them for that.