Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Meditation on My Basement’s Life
The cobwebs in the basement are thick and clammy. They hang like wet strings from water pipes and electrical wires running along the papered ceiling where, along the edges, you can see the 100-year-old 2 x 4s that are the bones of our house.
The plaster on the walls, reapplied every ten years or so, is peeling again. It curls in thick strands, suspended until the weight becomes too much and the plaster drops and shatters on the floor. Under the plaster is the brick foundation, each brick mortared to the next so carefully you think you might see fingerprints.
The floor used to be dirt, just dirt. Our three-story house with the brick foundation rested on dirt, brown and packed so hard it could be swept with a broom, but still dirt. We changed that though, covered the dirt with concrete, because it was unnerving. It seemed risky to have a house built on dirt, primitive, although the house with its dirt basement had already lasted a long time before we moved in. The house wasn’t going anywhere.
The basement holds many of our things including a black trunk of baby clothes I haven’t opened since my now 46-year old daughter became a toddler. Don’t ask me why. Part of me thinks her tiny undershirts and corduroy overalls may have mouldered after all these years and if I open the trunk and see just the remnants of her infant wardrobe in moldy shreds, it will break my heart. The trunk sits on an old wooden desk in the room where we keep all the old paint cans and vast stacks of record albums that we brought to our marriage but then never played anymore, the music on them tuned, I guess, to our private lives before we met.
There is a tiny bathroom in the basement. It is very narrow with just a toilet at one end, it has been decades since it flushed and would have been nearly as long since anyone ventured into the bathroom at all if my son hadn’t gone in searching for rats. You see, I had found a dead rat in the yard and called an exterminator. He came the next day, armed with a clipboard and a flashlight, and walked around the house and through the basement pointing out the countless ways that rats could get into our house, the tiny bathroom being one. They will swim up toilets, you know, a disquieting fact if there ever was one.
We threw out newspapers and magazines, old furniture, and anything that would be food or shelter to a rat. That is a long list of things, though, so the mound of debris in front of our house was enormous. It felt like we were unpacking a hundred years of secrets and mistakes for everyone to see. Vast quantities of dirty laundry, you might say. But we rid ourselves of rats, in the narrow bathroom and everywhere else in the basement.
Now we have a new washer and dryer and a new freezer. There are shelves for the big pots and cookers that we rarely use. Tools are stored in a set of red drawers, each with its own lock, and the birdseed is in sealed bins. In the back of the basement, though, is our old dining room table. It lies on its side with five chairs. When we bought it early in our marriage, the table had been a luxury, beautiful and glowing, but after many children and countless meals, there were scratches and water marks, scorches, and other abuses.
So, one day we replaced it with a newer table, much like the old, but perfect, and when the men came to set it up, they looked at the old table, about to be taken to the basement, and said, “This should have lasted a lifetime.” And the words stung, even though I was paying them and not looking for their opinion, so I’ve kept the old table and chairs in the basement all these years, the cobwebs draped on them like streamers from somebody’s birthday a long time ago.
12 Comments on “Meditation on My Basement’s Life”
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Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
Beautiful writing. Thank you. I work in basements regularly and I think I’ll have a different viewpoint now. Seeing all the memories and potential sitting down there. Thank you for sharing
Jim with:
Basement Waterproofing Services Harrisonburg
491 Claremont Ave
Harrisonburg, VA 22801
(540) 306-5900
Thank you for this comment. I never dreamed that someone whose work involved basements would read this. Thank you so much!
What a great piece. I dislike basements, by the way. They frighten me. Too many Stephen King books are to blame. So the whole rat scenario—I could’ve done without that. Still, a really great descriptive piece.
Yeah. The rats were a trip, for sure.
Shivers!
I wrote a 3-part piece about it a few years ago. Did you ever see it? Parts of it are pretty funny.
I might have! I can’t even remember what I wrote last week.
Fascinating memory. South African houses don’t include basements. About 90% of our houses are single storey buildings, which the British term “bungalows”. You may not be familiar with the word, although its hardly used these days, perhaps still in the UK, but not here. Therefore our houses don’t offer attics either in which to store unwanted Stuff; but we do have garages …. don’t go looking in there!
I’m always intrigued by basements! We had one in North Carolina, which was unusual. It was only a small section of the house’s footprint, just big enough for a washing machine and the furnace/AC. From that small area, you could see all around under the house and see light from outdoors. That meant that snakes could get into that basement! I never saw one there, but always expected it. When it rained hard the water threatened to enter, and we did have to pump out from underneath the house, once. Very strange basement situation…
Timely post for me, as I purge from the stores in my basement. From video games my sons no longer play, to camping gear I won’t use, we’re lightening up. As the literal foundation of our houses, I always think the shape the basement is in matters for our life foundation. May be a tenuous thread for those who don’t practice feng shui . . .
Reading this is like taking a slow walk down the stairs and through your basement. I was kept wondering where it would lead me until the very end.
And on that note, my mother gave me her farmhouse table and benches, handmade by an Amish man from her town. It’s large and unfinished other than some oil rubbed into the pine. She had it in her kitchen for many years for the plethora of adult guests and periodic grandchildren she entertained and fed around it. When Mom moved into an apartment, she decided it would be better used by my large family. But now it is marred, dinged, and scratched. I put on a tablecloth when whe comes to visit.
Oh – I love your story about your mom’s table.