Before I turned ten, before we moved out to the country, my whole world seemed to run up and down the rear stairwell of the house my grandfather built on Admiral Street. It was a finished stairwell, solid and ordinary in the way only old New England houses can be, but to me it was the main artery of the building — the place where every direction led somewhere different, somewhere important.

We lived on the second floor. If you went down one flight, you reached a little landing where three doors met. One door opened out to the backyard and the garages, one of which my father turned into my mother’s beauty shop. That shop was its own universe — the smells of hair dye and permanent solution, women talking, laughing, worrying, telling stories while my mother worked. Sometimes her clients were already friends, sometimes strangers who eventually became part of the landscape of our lives.

Another door on that landing opened into the first–floor apartment. We rented it out to people who were strangers at first and, in some cases, slowly became family friends. As a child, that door always carried a slight mystery for me — the sense that whole other lives were unfolding just a few feet from ours.

And then there was the third door — the one that led down into the basement. That was my father’s territory, his sanctum sanctorum, whether I had the words for it then or not. The biggest presence down there was the boiler, huge and almost alive, and in my earliest memory there was still coal, a wooden bin, and the chute where it came down. But the basement was also where his imagination lived. First, it was his model railroad that seemed to take up nearly a quarter of the room, and eventually it was the speedboat he built down there — a full-sized seventeen-footer — long before anyone else knew how he planned to get it out.

If you turned the other way in the stairwell — went up instead of down — you left the finished part of the house behind and entered the attic. In my earliest years, up to about five, the attic felt like another world entirely. I remember crawling up there with a strange mix of wonder and fear, convinced that the big trunk in the back was the seat of all unknown things. Even after it was eventually converted into a bedroom for Michael and me, when I was nine and ten, the attic never completely lost that feeling. The shadows still held their secrets, and the corners kept the echo of every mystery I’d ever imagined lived there.

All of these places — the backyard, the beauty shop, the rental apartment, the basement, the attic — were connected by that stairwell. It was the spine of the house and, in a way, the spine of my childhood. So many of the memories from my first ten years begin with someone opening one of those doors, or calling up or down those stairs, or telling us to stay put, or come quick, or not ask questions. It was the place you passed through on your way to whatever came next.

When I think back now, I realize that before I ever knew the larger world, that stairwell taught me that life had levels, thresholds, inside and outside, places you belonged and places you only visited. And every story that follows — the attic, the basement, the boat, the snowdrift, the lake summers, even the hard stories — begins somewhere on those steps.