Memoir | This Happened To Me | Childhood
The Clown in the Crawl Space: My Old Childhood Home
My family has never had money, but we’ve always had true wealth
It was an alarming sight. That was the first word that came to mind, followed swiftly by ‘unnerving’ and ‘disturbing.’
Standing crouched in the doorway of the little upstairs crawl space of my grandmother’s house, I hardly dared to breathe. I was motionless, overwhelmed with morbid curiosity, staring at the painting directly across from me.
The storage closet wasn’t very big; even as a child, I’d have to crouch on my knees to fit, but it went back a decent distance into the gloom. Most of it was taken up with old cardboard boxes and splintery milk crates stuffed with photographs. Broken Christmas ornaments made up a sizable proportion of the debris.
The thing that had my attention wasn’t in a box. It was a painting, child-sized and leaning upright against the back wall of the closet. For a moment I thought it was a mirror, but what I’d initially thought was my reflection turned out to just be a dusty canvas.
The painting, though, was oddly discomfiting to me. It was a clown.
