The third floorboard always creaked.
As the eldest child, Steve’s sister Kate was entitled to choose her own bedroom. With high-arching ceilings, exposed solid wood trusses and haunting acoustics, she chose the attic. To her the privacy and coolness factor of living in a space with an instant “escape route” from her parents was the biggest draw.
Although the home was over a hundred years old, most of the original hardwood flooring remained. In 1951 a small fire had devoured a portion of the attic, the bathroom below and roughly a quarter of the roof. Where the replacement met the old, untouched floor, a single nail had eroded. It was buried so deep as to cause a slight kink, an imperfection which in turn led to an ever-so-slight adjustment of the carpenter’s originally sketched plan. The result was a loose piece of floorboard, the third from the left-side wall. Located exactly 2 steps to the north from her closet and exactly 6 steps to the east from her bed, this spot emitted a slight creak every time Kate placed her foot upon it. For her it was a minor inconvenience and a point of avoidance when sneaking home late at night. For the boy who lived below her bedroom it provided an infrequent assurance that there was indeed someone above him. He didn’t know why, but this fact comforted Steve and brought a slight smile to his face every time his ears picked it up.
For hours he would sit next to his open closet door playing with his GI Joes and Transformers, removed from the “world” world, yet every time he’d hear that creak his back would stiffen. Tilting his head to the right ever so slightly, he sat prone, Indian-style, trying to deduce what she was doing up there. At times, after squabbles, he would imagine she was plotting something evil, masterminding a scheme for his eventual downfall. After Christmas and Birthday dinners he imagined she lay awake thinking how great her brother’s gift was.
The roof of 181 Cardson Place was impressive in only that the frequency with which shingles needed to be replaced. A large slope drained rain water to a plastic gutter on the left-most 40% of the two story home, while the remaining 60% graded slightly less, meaning that the same rainfall “whooshed” off the left side, falling in an orderly pitter-patter on the opposite side of the home. As a young boy Steve and his brother had spent hours during storms running across the upper-level cross way from their parents’ room to Steve’s room to compare the rates of fall. When their sister felt like playing along she would open her window that overlooked the left roof and roll a marble over the edge. By propping herself on the ledge, Kate could do a no-look, overhead toss to get marbles to fall from the right side, but the timing needed to pass by the bedroom window would be envied by a Swiss watchmaker.
The plastic gutter bordering the entire house was only noticed in the winter and for perilous reasons; glistening, beautiful icicles formed along the perimeter, threatening those who would walk underneath. Breaking was announced by a “shhhh” sound, followed by a loud crashing or “poof” depending on whether it landed in a snowbank or the sidewalk.
Steve’s childhood friend Trevor (now a banker with a prostate problem, 2 kids and a double mortgage in Connecticut) would challenge him to stand under the largest icicle while he threw snowballs. Steve would close his eyes, breathing heavily through his frozen-snot filled nose. His chest puffed out with each exhale and his heels dug deeper into the snow with each inhale. The one time Trevor was actually on target the 2 foot long wand cracked at the base. A light breeze altered its course and it fell at Steve’s feet, inches away from his winter boots. His eyes opened to the sight of crystalline shards at the edge of the snow-base. Trevor picked up the largest piece and started sucking on it. Steve picked up the base and put it in his mouth, crunching it like a hard candy.
Famous for having the second biggest driveway in the neighborhood (a sure sign of childhood Canadian status), the Bresnan family estate was the perfect launching point for many a boyhood adventure. At 5 years of age the five boys in the cul-de-sac (Trevor, Steve, Ryan, Chris and Chris) would push their Hot Wheels down the 20 foot driveway. One car invariably careened, ending up in the grass. The winning car would strike the sidewalk first and either stop abruptly or launch into the air, sometimes as high as 3 feet. At 10 years of age the boys (Ryan’s family moved away, Justin was the new kid but he didn’t come around that often as his family were Jehovah’s Witnesses) set up a ramp made of 4 pieces of wood: one long plank and three 2-feet long blocks. The first of these ramps (plank boards tended to crack when Chris #1 would ride over it) had an exposed nail that spelled doom for several tires over the years. When the ramp broke for a fourth time in a month, the boys put it off to the side of Steve’s house where parts of it remain to this day.
The winter-time Cul-de-Sac became a gathering place for kids. The municipal snowplow drove around in three circles, then deposit the accumulated load into the middle, as if filling a big donut. This hill, in peak snowfall years rising higher than any house on the street, saw battles the likes of which the Carthaginians would have been proud. With a running head-start from the Bresnan driveway, waves of children would attempt to become “King of the Hill”, some through brute force, some through tactics (distraction and flanking being the most popular). On calm Saturdays the surrounding neighborhoods would be silent, but as one drew closer to Cardson Place the squeals, shouts and laughter rose to a cacophony.
From the moment they stepped outside and put on their wool mittens to the time their parents yelled at them to come inside for dinner, the Hill was it. Although there was no official tally, the Bresnans traditionally dominated and ruled with an iron fist. Potential usurpers were pushed away, falling to the snowbank below. Chris #2′s cousin once fell so hard that his head hit the pavement below, but no one noticed except for his mother. As she came running towards her unmoving boy, Steve let out a mighty roar and pounded his chest like King Kong.
Perhaps his favorite part of the outside of the house, besides the garage where he formed his first band (Belly Button Window, named after a Hendrix song. He didn’t like Hendrix but he thought he should like Hendrix), was the linked chain hanging from the gutter to the ground. In over 20 years this chain neither rusted nor moved. At times Steve and his brother would lick the chain after a heavy rainfall, until their mother put a quick end to that by fear of an unknown chain disease. In the winter it would form a solid column. The boys would fight over who would get to take the hockey stick to it and cause the catastrophic ice explosion. Sometimes they would argue about this on the way home, only to find out that someone else had beaten them to it. They suspected the kid who delivered the newspaper and held a grudge against him until they were 17 and heard that his mother had passed away. There were more important things than icicles after all.
