Every home needs a secret like My Neighbor Totoro
As an adult, the search continues for the perfect secret hiding place
Even when you’ve lived somewhere for a large fraction of your life, I think there’s some awareness that it has not nor will it always be yours.
When I was growing up, my family moved every two or three years. That always seemed like just enough time for a house to start truly revealing itself — then we’d be gone.
One childhood bedroom was tucked under a sloped ceiling at the very top of the house. Behind two small doors were tunnels to the rest of the attic which, once filled with boxes, became like labyrinths. Another home had a second, hidden staircase leading to a disjointed part of the house — for the first few days, I couldn’t remember how to reach this other section. I started to think I’d dreamed it.
But sometime between my late teens and early 20s, as I moved from student accommodation to shared houses to a flat with a then-girlfriend, moving lost the magic. There are only so many times you can perch an ironing board across the passenger seats of a Ford Fiesta or see a beloved houseplant thrown against the windscreen because you braked too hard. I got pretty good at fitting all my earthly possessions into very compact spaces, but that’s a different kind of magic altogether.
(Moving to France last year was among the most stressful things I’ve ever done in my life. Don’t get me wrong — living in France is great. It’s just that my determination to stay here forever is more closely correlated with how long I believe it’ll take me to get over the stress of moving.)
Then, this week, I watched My Neighbor Totoro and some of that magical feeling around moving came back. It seemed most strongly tied to the phrase “secret hiding place” — something I haven’t been able to afford in any flat of my own but of which my parents’ houses always seemed to have plenty. It jogged the memory of one house — enclosed in a dry stack stone wall, lost in an overgrown tangle of nettles — and a certainty in my nine-year-old mind that this place would have lots of secret hiding places. There was definitely magic there — more than anywhere else I had ever lived or would ever live.
But, in the end, we didn’t move there. And, despite many of my childhood homes having something in the way of secrets, I can’t imagine any of them compared. That’s okay. Like the dad in My Neighbor Totoro, a haunted house is something I can always look forward to. That feeling is still out there.
