Our carpet and most of our furnishings came from the garage, an A-frame structure with a steeply pitched tar roof and two large wooden doors that opened like a barn. My parents stored some of our belongings in the garage when we first arrived, but with the exception of a brief and unsuccessful hunt for some missing pots and pans, I don’t think my mother ever set foot in the place. Probably because it was dark, smelly, and housed more rats than a research laboratory.

To Joel and me the garage was a wonderland that housed a million things to ignite a boy’s imagination. There were large spring traps, tin washtubs, boxes of ancient National Geographics, a World War II GI helmet, and even a kerosene lantern with several containers of kerosene. Whenever we needed something we’d head to the garage where we’d either find what we were looking for or forget about it in the excitement of a greater discovery. Once we went in looking for a lamp and found a hand-pump brass fire extinguisher and an electric generator from an old telephone that produced enough voltage to knock you on your keister if you touched the contacts while someone wound the crank. To make our chess games more interesting, we attached wires to the generator—which the loser had to hold for one full crank. To this day Joel doesn’t play chess.

On one of our expeditions we found a mattress in the rafters above the garage and pushed it down. It looked like generations of mice had made the mattress their home, but they all fled at our arrival (or died in the fall). We broomed off the mice droppings and a few dead mice, then dragged it to the clubhouse.

There was a water spigot inside our clubhouse, one of the old orange hand-lever types. We discovered it after we started building. Since we couldn’t move it, we just built around it, later deciding it technically gave our clubhouse indoor plumbing.

Even better than plumbing was electricity. Joel found a light socket and an old yellow extension cord, which we ran from the garage. We hung it from the ceiling and attached a light bulb. That night we brought in our sleeping bags and slept there. We stayed up playing Go Fish and Rook while eating walnuts from our trees until two in the morning. When we finally turned out the light it was darker than a cave, which kind of scared Joel. The next time we slept out we plugged in a nightlight. It lit the clubhouse in an eerie UFO alien green, which was still better than total darkness.

One day I was sitting at the kitchen table drawing cartoons when Joel came running inside. “Hey, come out to the clubhouse,” he said excitedly.

“What?”

“You gotta come see.”

I followed him out and crawled through the door to be greeted by the astringent odor of fresh paint.