My attention lands on the yellow bench that’s usually flush against the basement door, and which is now pushed outward. Ahh.

He’s gone to visit Little Teller City.

When I was around ten, Grandpa went through a phase in which he obsessively built a child-size village in his basement, working on it night and day for the better part of a year. Every time we visited, he was down in that basement, door locked, drilling and painting and injuring himself a good bit. “You don’t have the knees for cobblestones, you old goat!” Grandma would yell down.

The grand reveal was thrilling. We made a special trip out for it, the first visitors to Little Teller City. He’d recycled a few props from movie sets, as he used to be a set designer and still had a few connections. The winding street, paved with real cobblestones, is named Bettie Boulevard. (“That’s not after you, it’s after Grandma,” Athena told me, in case I got any ideas.) There’s Rocky Road Ice Cream Parlor with fake ice cream scoops and a cash register that dings, Mountain Express Post Office where you can dress up with mail bags. A milk bottle delivery service. Old-fashioned bicycles with baskets on the front. Gold Rush Bookshop. Teller City Market with its miniature shopping carts and The Little Red Schoolhouse, with four desks for the grandkids.

Grandpa followed us from one area to another, pointing out any cool details we might have missed. It was delightful, a tiny town all to ourselves. My siblings and I bossed each other, fighting over who got to deliver mail, who got to be the teacher, who had to work at Gold Rush Bookshop (it was the smallest building packed mostly with books from the ’80s that made you sneeze when you turned their pages). Teller City Market was the clear favorite. It was the only building that could comfortably fit all four of us at once, and the fake food was so high quality we agreed we could probably trick our parents into thinking it was real. Little Teller City ends in a painted mountainscape, a rather slapdash mural of flowers and sky—by that point in creating the town, Grandpa was burned out and wanted it to be done.

I step carefully down the steep cement stairs, cool air wafting up to greet me. Above, the dryer hums, vibrating the exposed beams. Grandpa had meant to install a realistic sky on the ceiling, but building this place took ten years off his life and he couldn’t bring himself to lift a paint roller one more time. Hiring somebody else to do it was out of the question. Lawrence Watson would rather raze this basement to ash than let another man lay his incompetent mitts on it.

Our interest wore off after a couple of years, largely because there are no televisions in the Mayberry-esque time capsule. I haven’t been down here in a good while, so I expected cobwebs (the great-grandkids aren’t allowed in the basement because they “don’t appreciate it enough”) and dust. Maybe I’d crawl into the market and reflect on ye olden days, in which I was small enough to fit properly, and how Dad was a good enough sport to play along, pretending to be fooled by our plastic cheeseburgers. How the bite marks he left in them made us fall over with laughter.