Eight-year-old me clutches my one-year-old brother in the space above the giant fireplace of our Dogwood Drive Levittown home. How I got up there is simple. I climbed using a combination of a kitchen step stool and those shelves you see below me. How I got my baby brother up there was probably my parents’ worst nightmare. My best guess is that I stood on the step stool and put him there before I climbed up.

The dark angle you see above my head is not a room corner. This shelf was open air on both sides. My mother had the ceiling of the white kitchen painted bright red. That is the edge of the kitchen ceiling paint transitioning to the white of the living room ceiling. The kitchen/living room wall is across the right center of the frame. This was at the very end of the Levittown era of my childhood. Our next home in Princeton, New Jersey was being built for us by this time.

Since one of my parents took the picture, they clearly found out what I had done. I suspect they found out after I had done it, not before. I was not punished in any way, but they might have suggested that I play up by the ceiling myself, and leave my living doll brother for more floor-based hiding places and games.