The second surprise I found when I was working in the Yoda Room was behind a blue shelf that was screwed to the wall. The shelf is homemade – a horizontal piece of wood supported by a cross piece below it and then attached to a back piece, with the back piece screwed into the wall. I always thought the shelf was in a funny spot, sort of poking out into the room and making the space feel smaller than it really is.
So when I unscrewed the shelf from the wall and saw a panel cut into the drywall behind it, I was kind of excited.
It was too small to be a secret passage-way. It was too big to be a spider door, even for our big spiders. Was it a hiding spot? A safe? A drug den? A mini drug den? The shelfway to the world next to Narnia?
Oh…
It was a wrench, clinging to a pipe that leads to the hose on the outside of the house. But it also was more than that. It was The English Patient of lost wrenches. Someone left the wrench in this dark spot and promised to come back – PROMISED – but then couldn’t, and the wrench couldn’t find its way out, and died clinging to the pipe helplessly, and finally, FINALLY somebody came back and brought the wrench out into the world again, but it was too late, it was JUST TOO LATE…
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you know what movie you need to watch next. That’s right. (With apologies to Michael Ondaatje.)
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