Shelters of the spirit
It is in the shelter of each other that the people live. My first grade friend Mattie Mae was a happy kid who wore her hair in short braids all over her head, fastened with colorful plastic barrettes. She lived on the other side of the tracks in my small hometown. I discovered this the day I went to her house to play after school. Mattie Mae’s prairie- type sod house was buried in the ground like a hobbit’s habitat, all covered with grass. Its threshold, however, stood upright in a mound of rounded earth, looking nonsensical and inventive. The door opened to a stairway leading down into a dark room with a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Apart from this, the brightest thing in the underground room was the smile on the face of Mattie Mae’s mother, waiting with cookies and milk.
Before visiting Mattie Mae, I’d seen underground storm shelters on my cousins’ farms. These were primitive dugouts covered with a wooden door that lay flush with the ground. In the earlier part of the last century, you had to lift the heavy door of a shelter straight up to slip in under it, and you had to be careful not to squish your fingers when it soundly slammed down. I ventured into a shelter in a game of hide-and-seek. Peeking out through cracks in the wooden door, I shivered from the damp chill of the cave below and the excitement of concealment.
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