Hey! It's me, Madison!

Hey, guys! My name is Madison Terrence, but my friends call me Maddy. Sometimes I even let Mica, my irritating little brother, call me Maddy. We live in a cool underground house that my Grandpa Rocky built in western Virginia. You can't tell it from the street, but it's a four-story mansion. I like that it's hidden. Sometimes I wish I was hidden. Whether it's the mysterious weirdness down at Grandpa's old rock quarry, or my personal curse, being able to remember everything I've ever seen or read, there is always someone in Cavern City ragging on me about it.

Anyway, back to my house. It's built into the side of a mountain, so all you can see from the street is the flat front of a rock-sided house appearing to only have an upstairs and a downstairs. Everything else is hidden underground, with the fourth floor carved up into the rock, and the bottom floor dug down into the earth. You probably think, with my house being built into a mountain, that I don't have a back yard to hang out in. Not true. I have the best backyard in town!

It's a huge-mongous limestone cavern that is four stories tall, just like our house. And it's from the top floor of the house where you can get the best view of The Grand Hall and it's wonderful speleothems. Mica hates when I use the proper term for cave formation, but speleothems is what they are. I would know, since I teach geology classes at the nearby university. But that's only on the weekends. Since I'm 11-years-old, I still have to deal with the fifth grade during the week.

The entire top floor of the house is Grandpa's Attic, a treasure room filled from floor to ceiling with some pretty wild stuff that he's collected since he was young. That's a lot of collecting! I spend a lot of time up there exploring the cabinets, racks, and shelves of rocks, minerals, fossils, and some really weird artifacts that I still haven't figured out yet.

More about the treasure room next time . . . gotta run . . . my obnoxious brother just pushed his way in here . . .

Maddy