An iceberg of ancient plaster splattered on the floor spewing a putrid cloud. Coughing, Cat and I wandered down the hall to an open room, pulling our masks down and grabbing our plastic water bottles.

We were standing in a building that was over 100 years old. We were 6 months into a renovation project that had us peeling back every scab in the building before healing it, anew. So far, we had scratched away at the sand and spiders in the basement, pulled down cheap paneling and old carpet that littered the former office space of a bathroom stall distributor who went out of business in the 90’s, and cleared out old wares from the apartments above. We hadn’t even begun.

After buying the building, the loan we were able to acquire was the only money we were able to invest in its renovation, and it felt like it was wilting away faster than a ticking clock.

We were motivated. We thought going all in, pitching passion and a desire that the world could change would, well, change the world enough that the stars would align, and we would gracefully and briskly saunter into our newly healed safe space to conjure magic and medicine that could heal generations.

We swigged from the bottles and looked up at each other. Our faces streaked with black soot from chimneys that had run hot for a century. The ash perfectly contoured our features and made a comical jest at our filthy situation. We were afraid of what we had started, and as a result we were being overly cautious with the funds we had signed our signatures 40 times each for. We knew from the beginning it was not enough, and so we stood completely still at the edge of this building renovation, pondering the ways we could get to the other side.

Once you start peeling back the layers in a 100 year old building you wonder how all the filth and crookedness got there. (If this single building could hold so much filth, is there hope for our neighboring bay?) Each beam in the building smiled, curving in the center of each room and meeting back up at the common wall these two row homes shared. Wallpaper frayed at the edges and as it was peeled away it told secrets from the past. Teal and pink tea pots in a small room on the first floor, rushing up against sail boats and colonizers twirling around in maroon and mustard stains, gentle Queen Anne’s lace brushing up in lavender, and an almost shimmering feather falling gracefully down. Even by the sixth month, after bringing in two separate professional demolition crews, we still found ourselves peeling back more layers by ourselves, discovering new layers in our own fruition.

And in between each layer, mold spores, dust and dander, mouse shit, notes from past contractors, and stains from a roof that had gone uncared for far too long. The plaster that lay bare underneath was made with horse hair, and when caressed the wrong way it would crumble into puddles on the floor that made a smell that reminded me of what one might find in the archeological section in an old museum.

We both got used to our eyes itching, our skin, when exposed, stinging, our nostrils swelling up in protest against the air itself. Could you imagine if we died fighting for our dreams? From the dust, from disintegrating materials dreamed up by our forefathers. We had had this conversation before, the one that mixed words of exhaustion, a sense of being overwhelmed, fear, confusion, had we made a mistake? We decided to escape the dust further and moved up through the building until we came to our favorite room on the third floor. It was big and open, and we had scraped away all the wall paper and pulled every nail left behind from the old plaster ceilings, hundreds.

People say time is money. That money can buy time. And for the first 10 months of being in the building we had forgotten (never really known) that’s how the game’s played. We thought it mattered that we keep our other businesses afloat, that we give ourselves up to the riptide pulling us away from family and friends and meals, and movement, and play, and sleep. We thought, this is how we’ve made things work when slogging through previous challenges and, after-all, we took this burden on, and we had no other choice but to hold what is too heavy for too long. And so, on the cusp of realizing much of this was made up, a myth really, and therefore is more bedible and pliable then we could even comprehend at the time, we sat on the floor in our favorite room.

Cat sat by the corner of the building, knocking her shoe against some cracking plaster and watching it slowly avalanche further down the wall. I sat slouched across from her twisting my empty water bottle into two. Suddenly we both heard a *PING* and we looked at what had fallen from the rafters above. Two keys, small, tarnished and tied together by frayed rope. We looked at the keys, and then back up at each other, and back down at the keys. We crawled across the floor and met in the middle, passing the keys back and forth. The two keys had identical teeth, short with a thumb sized O at the end.

I said, “I thought we gutted the attic when we demoed this ceiling”. We both cocked our necks back and surveyed the ceiling as though we hadn’t seen it before. In the center of the room was a square hole that sat snug between two joists.

“Did you notice that hole before?” said Cat.

“No. Somehow after spending four hours removing plaster and another 4 peeling wallpaper, we missed it?” said Kiah, “I honestly trolled this whole building looking for holes after partially falling through one! Should we see what’s up there?”

“I am not poking my head up into a dark hole! I literally swept a bird’s nest off of one of those rafters! Absolutely not, no way. But… I would get you the ladder?”

“OMG… okay, okay. Fine” said Kiah.

With one hand holding my phone as a light, and the other pulling me up the ladder I slowly pushed my head through the dark, ominous hole. The attic room was mostly dark, some slices of light puncturing through wood slats. I couldn’t fit all the way in, so I rested my elbows on the edge of the opening while staying firmly on the ladder that seemed to be rooted in another world. I scanned my light over the objects immediately in front of me, and began to tell Cat what I saw. An old lamp, of uncertain color, caked in the old soot that had built up in this crawl space over more than a century. A cardboard box of mostly broken glass, a book called “A Cowboy’s Delight, $1.25”, loose marbles, a tarot deck. I stopped to pass what seemed like secret treasures down to Cat, and started again. A US Navy Goblet, an old nintendo, birthday cards, and, “Eww! A nest made out of old comics!”.

“Kiah, ew! How are we still finding so many places we need to clean!”.

“Ugh, I don’t know… Oh wait!”, I stretched further into the crawl space, my feet momentarily lifting from the ladder so that I hung from the hole balancing on my rib cage. My hand wrapped around an O shaped handle and I tugged scraping my elbow against an old nail. I pulled the small chest until it rested near the lamp, dancing my feet around until they landed back on the ladder.

Once we had gotten it down to the floor we sat and looked, befuddled, as the chest rested at our feet. It was old, made of pine, with canvas and iron bent around it. There was a lock, and a keyhole. I looked up at Cat and said, “you have to see if it’s a match with the keys”.

“You know we’re about to open this up and find another damn nest right?”.

“I mean, yea, 90% it’s a nest, 9% there is a cicada inside that will shoot up into your face, and 1% it’s something cool, but you gotta open it”.

Cat kneeled down over the chest and fit the first key in the lock and, roughly, wiggled it around until she heard a *click*. She slowly opened the chest lid. It was lined with a rich, red velvet. Coins, pearls and gemstones filled to the brim. Silence.

“Uh uh”.

“Wait”.

“What?”

“Hahahahahahahahaha”

“Oh fuck, it’s not a nest”.

Cat and Kiah used the attic treasure to build the Our Time space as if time didn’t exist and dreams were meant to be realized. They lived happily ever after, the building too.

*This is a fictional story. Real change does not happen from sheer happenstance, real change does not happen by putting money ahead of time and ahead of people, change does not happen when we grind ourselves down. Change happens through collaboration, through open learning and trying new things. Change happens, the treasure in this story did not. Our Time will happen with or without the tricks and plays of “treasure”. Because we’re making it happen together, with you! You, the person reading this story and believing in a fairytale that is in our own control. Us, the people creating new ideas and jokes and dishes and relationships that could be strong enough to be the change. Would it be distasteful to take this time to ask you to contribute to our Go-Fund Me? Join us and get in on the joke.

This is a fictional story based on real people and real events.

Braiding Seeds Mural