I've been traveling - visiting family - but now I am back, curled up in my favorite chair with my computer and a glass of wine. And I have a story to tell you, the latest installment in the ongoing saga of one woman's failure to understand how doorknobs work.

I have this habit, apparently, of locking myself out of places. Cars. Hotel rooms. Houses. I did it so many times in our current house that we ended up changing the locks, because we used to have the kind where the doorknob can still turn on the inside if it's locked on the outside, and that was ... bad. My most spectacular door failure so far was probably locking myself out of my sister's house wearing nothing but my nightgown when it was 30F and she was working an overnight shift. (After numerous attempts to break into her house using improvised tools, I ended up getting into her unheated basement -- which has an outside entrance, one of those old cellar-type trapdoors like in The Wizard of Oz, but no way into the house -- and huddling under a pile of craft supplies until morning, while trying not to think about black widow spiders.)

At least this time I was indoors.

Okay, let me set the stage. This past week, I was staying at my grandmother's house, along with my mom and stepdad. Grandma only has one guest bedroom, so obviously the older couple got it, and I slept in the living room. Grandma's house is centrally located for a lot of the family, so it's a common overnight-stopover place for us, and this system (someone gets the guest room, everyone else gets the living room) is the usual way we do things.

Since she's always having children and grandchildren drop in on her, she's got a closet under the stairs that's stuffed mostly full of bedding. It's a very Harry Potter sort of closet: as wide as the stairs (so about 3 feet wide), person-height in the front, and sloping very rapidly down to the floor in the back. There's a light in it. It's technically walk-in, but only just.

When we've done this in the past, I've left my luggage in the guest room, but this means that I have no access to my toothbrush, clean clothes, etc. until my mom gets up, and she's a late sleeper. This time, I had the bright idea of putting my luggage in the closet. That way, it's right there, and if I need a book or a sweater or something in the middle of the night, I can get it.

The first morning, I woke up before anyone else, and I realized that I could get dressed in the closet too. Normally I would take my clothes into the garage and do it there, because not all of the living room windows have curtains, but this would be a lot warmer and more convenient.

So I got in the closet and dressed -- kind of a difficult process; between the narrowness and the fact that it's full of stuff, it's hard to turn around without bumping into anything, but eventually I was dressed, and then I turned around and discovered that the closet door doesn't open from the inside.

It's probably supposed to, but there's something wrong with the knob. From the outside, it turns just fine; on the inside, it merely spins and does nothing.

I stood there for a moment, staring at the door, while slowly the fact sunk in that I have now locked myself in a 3-foot-wide closet while everyone else is asleep upstairs.

I have mild claustrophobia, which normally doesn't bother me too much, but I have never in my life come closer to having a full-blown claustrophobia panic attack. I could feel myself breaking out in a sweat and going into a sort of rapid mental downhill spiral. The only thing I could think of was to distract myself, very fast, right now. So I sat down and did an inventory of the contents of my suitcase. That helped. I also had a sketchbook and some other stuff. As long as I concentrated hard on keeping my attention 100% focused on something other than BEING TRAPPED IN A CLOSET I CAN'T GET OUT OF, I was (mostly) okay.

Also, I could hear someone, who turned out to be Grandma, moving around upstairs and eventually coming down the stairs, at which point I made slightly sheepish banging noises until she noticed. I guess I was probably only in there for about 15 minutes. I am very glad that I didn't actually get up when I woke up, but instead chose to lie in bed for an hour or so, which saved me from an extra hour of closet exile.

Everyone, I should add, was very supportive, though I'm sure the whole thing will go down in family lore as That Time [Sholio] Locked Herself In the Closet. ... and we were also grateful that we discovered the closet's design flaw this way, rather than, say, Grandma, who lives alone, locking herself in the closet for two days.