As a visitor goes up the narrow stairs to the attic, he or she will see the original plank floors, the rafters, and shingles overhead. This attic had been sealed off since about 1907 until restoration in 1967, and this fortunate circumstance accounts for the fact that the original paper still decorates the walls of Cather's room. Little has been changed in the attic since the Cather children slept in there in their iron beds. The last story that Willa Cather wrote, "The Best Years" centers around this house and this attic where the children dreamed so many happy dreams.
"In ‘The Best Years'" this attic is the private world of the children ‘where there were no older people poking about to spoil things...." The children slept dormitory style. "When Cather grew too old to share the dormitory with her brothers, an ell-shaped gable wing of the main attic was partitioned off to giver her a private room. This is the room that Thea Kronborg occupies in The Song of the Lark..." (Woodress 47)
"Upstairs was a story in itself, a secret romance. No caller or neighbour had ever been allowed to go up there. All the children loved it-it was their very own world. In this spacious, undivided loft were two brick chimneys, going up in neat little stairsteps from the plank floor to the shingle roof-and out of it to the stars!" "The Best Years"
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