This is my rendition of a story/scenario I heard from someone the other day...I think it's kind of a fun concept, and I had a lot of fun fleshing the story out from the skeleton I had.
One beautiful weekend in the fall, Andy had gone to visit his grandparents. The weather was perfect, one of those fall days where it’s just cool enough in the morning to need a sweatshirt, and hot enough by afternoon to be in shorts. School had just started, and Andy was glad to be outside running around. His grandparent’s house was one of his favorite places in the world. It was a massive old house, a giant backyard to play in, and always had the best sweets laying around for him to eat when he got hungry.
Andy had been through the house so many times, he could almost do it blindfolded. He always started in the same place, upstairs in the bedrooms. Some of the things that his father had as a little boy were still there, toy trucks, an old baseball, even some of his father’s old clothes. He would spend forever looking through drawers of baseball cards and toys, and then move on to some of the other old bedrooms. He looked through trunks filled with things from his aunts and uncles, toys, letters, pictures they had drawn as kids. One of his favorite bedrooms was his oldest uncles bedroom...he had loved to build model airplanes when he was younger, and the room had five or six of them still in there. Andy would imagine he was a fighter pilot, soaring through the sky.
After he finished looking through the bedrooms, he’d move onto the library. Hundreds and hundreds of books, some that were half as big as he was, some that were tiny and fragile, some that he could read, and some that he could not. He especially loved the picture books that had belonged to his father. He would sit in one of the big red overstuffed chairs by the dusty windows and flip through several of them, only stopping when the dust from the yellowed pages got so thick that it made him sneeze. After leaving the library, he would move on to his grandfather’s study. Though this room didn’t have much to play with in it (or at least not much that his grandfather would let him touch), it still had one of his favorite things to look at… a picture of his grandfather with the president—his grandfather had gotten to meet him once when he was a young man, and it showed the president and his grandfather shaking hands, and had a scrawled signature in the bottom right corner that Andy couldn’t read, but he knew that it was the president who had signed it.
After he finished upstairs, he would head down a floor to the room where his grandfather had stuffed several animals that he had captured over the years. One of his favorites was the head of a big bear…sometimes he would imagine that it was one of his teddy bears, only giant sized. He would stalk around in that room playing safari, pretending to run from a stampeding elephant, or proudly standing next to the mountain lion, his prized catch of the day.
When he’d finished playing safari, he would wander down to the living room where his grandfather would sit and read the paper and smoke his pipe, occasionally lowering the paper as his grandson poked around the different corners of the room, smiling, and his grandmother sat across the room, knitting needles clicking away. Andy looked in the cabinet filled with arrowheads and tools that his grandpa had found in the field outside his house, trying to think of the people who had made them long ago. In another cabinet were several trophies and medals, some that his grandfather and grandmother had gotten, some that his father and his aunts and uncles had acquired too. There were a few smaller ones that Andy’s grandfather would let him play with, and Andy would parade them around the room as if he had just won the gold medal in the Olympics.
A bookcase stood in one end of the room, but in it were not books but photos. There were some of his parents, some of him, and even a few old black and white ones of his grandfather and grandmother when they weren’t much older than Andy. Andy loved looking at the ones of his father when he was young, mostly because as he looked at the pictures, he thought they looked an awful lot like him.
Then Andy would move on to the kitchen. He loved the way this room always smelled, a combination between chocolate chip cookies, fresh baked bread, and coffee. As always, there was a plate of cookies sitting on the counter, and Andy would grab one and begin to walk around the room, looking in cupboards that held old dishes and pots and pans. And would pull out several of the pots and pans, grab one of his grandmother’s wooden spoons, and pretend that he was the drummer of the greatest rock band in the world. He played so loud that after a while, his own ears began to hurt. After he put the dishes away, he would walk out into the big entry way where the giant crystal chandelier hung, sparkling in the afternoon sunlight. He’d imagine he was flying in a spaceship, surrounded by a thousand stars, sparkling in the night sky. The winding oak banister spiraled up to the second floor, and he’d gotten caught many many times sliding down the railing. He then looked down at the big rug that lay on the floor, a mixture of blues and reds and greens faded with the years. That didn’t matter though…faded or not…it still made a pretty amazing magic carpet.
About this time, Andy’s grandpa would come out to the entryway and see if Andy wanted to go for a walk in the grove of trees behind the house, and they’d each pick a couple of apples. They would munch on their apples and talk, about school, about what he’d done during the summer, about something Andy had come across in the house that he hadn’t noticed before, or just about anything. After they were tired of walking, they’d start to head back.
Andy had been telling his grandfather about what he’d learned in Sunday school the past week, and right before they reached the front porch and were going to sit on the swing and have some of his grandma’s cookies and ice cold milk, he asked his grandfather, “Grandpa, what do you think heaven will be like?” Andy expected his grandfather to talk about beautiful things like gold and the chandelier that hung in the entry, but instead, Andy’s grandfather stood up and motioned for Andy to follow him. He walked around the house and bent over to open the cellar doors.
Andy loved his grandparent’s house, but he HATED the basement. He’d only been down there twice, and that was enough. It was a dirt floor, and spider webs hung in every corner…Andy was always sure he’d end up with a spider down his shirt. There was one dingy, dirty light bulb that lit the stairway down into the cellar, and otherwise, you had to bring a flashlight with you. Andy could make out a few jars of tomatoes and beans in the semi-darkness, but that was pretty much all that was down there. By this time, Andy was very confused. How could the cellar be like heaven? What on earth was his grandpa going to tell him?
Andy’s grandpa stopped in the middle of the cellar and told Andy to look up. Now, when Andy was in the cellar, he generally kept his eyes on the ground, partly because he really didn’t want to know what was hanging over his head, and partly because he had to watch his feet to make sure he didn’t trip over anything in the dim light. As Andy looked up, he could see little lines of light, sparkles of the light that filled the house that sat above them. Andy had never noticed that you could see light before. Andy’s grandfather began to speak. “I have lived in this house for more than 60 years, and I have walked through every room more times than you can imagine. My parents owned it before me, and I inherited it from them. One of my favorite places is this cellar. Just like you, I hated it when I was younger. But, as I grew older, I would come down here from time to time and just sit, staring up at the cracks in the floorboards.”
“Andy, this cellar is the earth we are living in. Though we enjoy ourselves here, there are many things that make this world dark – wars, fighting, hunger, and other kinds of destruction. But, we get little glimpses of heaven all the time—in the smile of a friend, in a kind deed done by one person for another, or even walking in the woods and seeing a bird fly above your head. It is those little moments, those glimpses of light that make this world brighter, just like the light coming through the floorboards from the house helps light this cellar. That, Andy, is what heaven is like. The light coming down through the cracks in the floorboards of heaven is what give this world light and hope.”
Andy and his grandfather walked back up the stairs and went back up to the porch where his grandmother already sat, with a plate of cookies and a pitcher of milk and some glasses next to her on the table. Andy was pretty sure that this afternoon was one of the rays of light from heaven that his grandpa had talked about.
