Penny Nolte

     Our grandfather’s closet held an upside-down staircase circling down from high above, all the way to the floor. “Where might it go,” he’d ask, “if we all jumped to the ceiling?”

     A crowded row of hooks across the wall held his clothes, still smelling of smoke though he’d quit years before. On the floor, original boxes held his well-worn shoes, some steel-toed, some dressy, each pair cleaned or polished, and wrapped up in tissue paper. Just like at a shoe store.

     The lowest closet drawer, the one we could reach, was stuffed with paper bags. I don’t think he ever threw one away. When we were dropped off for the day, on weekends or during summer vacation, we used Grandpa’s bags to draw on. Or to cut out crowns decorated with flowers and fish. One day, when the power went out, he said, “Let’s invent a card game!” and we all sat by the window, tracing the Old Maid onto paper bags to make a new deck, with new rules.

     Under the upside-down staircase, there were boxes of trains. Some complete sets, others in pieces. I never saw them run. But our Dad said, once when he was a little kid, all of them were set up and working in the living room, and that they took up the whole floor.

     Much later, clearing out Dad’s closet, I found one of Grandpa’s engines in a shoe box, all polished and wrapped up in tissue paper.

Penny Nolte (she/her/hers) creates gentle narratives of family and place. After a long pause from storytelling, her new work is beginning to appear in literary magazines, including Macrame Literary Journal and Dorothy Parker's Ashes. Penny grew up on the shores of Lake Ontario and now makes her home in Vermont.