Not For the Feint at Heart
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This post is dedicated to my brothers and their wives; my sister and her husband; and Giancarlo and our children, in hopes that they will better understand the main setting of our formative years, and how it may have influenced our psychological make-up and emotional responses to various situations.
During an unexpected trip to Utah recently, I was able to spend time with my younger brothers and their wives. Inevitably, when we get together the subject of The Basement comes up. When we discuss, reminisce, and marvel over what really was the center of our childhoods, our spouses make comments like, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe you turned out so normal," or "This is explaining a lot," or "Every time we get together I hear another story that is worse than all the rest."
Growing up in The Basement, I knew it was all wrong. Nobody told me, but there was this inner voice shouting, "This is all wrong!" It may have been the still, small, voice trying to protect me from harm. I don't know.
So allow me to take you on a tour:
The Stairs
Picture, if you will, a staircase leading from an unbelievable mess of a kitchen (that's a whole other blog) down to a dank, dark basement. Let's decend. Be careful! There aren't really actually stairs anymore since my little brothers recarpteded. Oh, it certainly needed to be done. However, for some reason, they didn't tear out the old carpet and padding. They just put the carpet right over the old, which turned it into kind of a cushy, bumpy carpet slide. Be aware as you walk. You have to kind of turn your feet so they fit in the three inch landing on each step. If you'd rather, you can just sit down and slide. It might be safer.
"Whew!" We made it to the bottom without falling to our deaths. "Watch out!" Oh, too late. You just stepped in dog crap. It is always at the bottom of the stairs. For some reason, that is the dog's preferred place. Sometimes it will sit there for days before somebody finally gets disgusted enough to at least halfheartedly clean it up.
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The "Family Room"
Moving on and turning to the room on the right, we are greeted by the family room. I see you're wondering what the smell is. Well, look around a bit and you'll see that there are dishes with moldy, crusted over, rotten food on them that have been sitting there for at least a month, maybe two. Don't mind all the trash and piles of miscellaneous stuff strewn about. Do you like all the couches? Everybody gets their own couch. We've been very fortunate that people know that we're a bit needy. Whenever the neighbors get a new couch, they give us their old one. Oh, except for that plaid one, it's from D.I. Don't sit on the one with the burnt orange slipcover that is half torn off, the springs have broken on one side, and you might sink in and get the poke of your life!
Would you like to watch some tv? Here's the remote. Well, it's actually a pair of pliers. Just get up and stick into the hole where the channel knob used to be, squeeze, and turn to the channel of your choice. Sorry; there are only three channels to choose from. Four, if you count KBYU.
If you ever come back and want to watch tv, just make sure the basement isn't flooded when you go to change the channel. One of my siblings (I can't remember which one) made that mistake and they got a shock to remember, that's for sure!
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Raw Sewage and Irrigation Water
What's that? You're wondering about the basement being flooded? Ah, well, you kind of learn to get used to it, I guess. Except when it's raw sewage. That's a bit hard to overlook. You see, sometimes the flooding comes from the window wells, like when we have an irrigation turn and the water gets out of dad's control (there's really only so much one man can do with a shovel to combat a large ditch full of water rushing through property where the house is at the lowest level) and the water comes rushing into the window wells and then leaks into the rooms, putting at least six inches of water onto the floor. And the sewage flooding is when the septic tank gets too full and it backs up into the drains on the basement floor. That usually happens when the washing machine is draining and someone flushes the toilet at the same time. Don't worry, sometimes it gets cleaned up sort of.
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The Scary Room
Anywho! Moving across the hall, we have The Scary Room. Kindly step through the blanket doorway into the darkness. Watch your step. More dog poop, broken canning jars mixed with sticky peaches, rancid tomatoes, or (God forbid) a rabbit carcass. Where is that lamp? Oh there. Well, that's at least a little bit of light. All this stuff is just junk that for some reason is being held onto. Boxes of who knows what, Dad's old art supplies, and the deep freeze. Let's look inside. Hmmmm. Just frozen rabbits, chickens, and maybe some ground goat meat. Oh, and down at the bottom are the old ice cream buckets full of trout frozen in ice. We caught those in Idaho maybe, oh, eight years ago?
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The Bedrooms
Let's get out of here. Moving down the hall we come to three bedrooms. Technically, two bedrooms, and one tiny unfinished bathroom that someone is temporarily claiming as their bedroom. The bed barely fits and that's all. Other than the furnace, water heater, and a big empty tank that was supposed to be part of a revolutionary heating system involving a wood burning stove that never really worked without spewing massive plumes of smoke into the house.
Each of the bedrooms has been appointed with a blanket doorway allowing privacy and insulation from the noisy family. Not much satisfaction comes from slamming the blanket in a fit of anger, I have to say! It does provide a sense of a barrier between me and the chaos on the other side. Ahh, here we are, my bedroom. My oasis. My escape. My haven, if you will. Yes, it does have salvaged orange and red shag carpet that needs to be raked rather than vacuumed. But it's mine and I prefer it over cement. Like two of my walls. While they're unfinished cement I have done a nice job decorating with odds and ends found throughout the house. Look at this decoration. Looks like modern art, right? Actually, it is a stainless cup and toothbrush holder that fastens into the wall, but I've turned it on its side, and voila! Modern art.
The hanging blanket next to mine is the entrance to a small bathroom. However, it was never finished, each of my brothers at one time or another, in an effort to have a bit of privacy, has staked it out as their bedroom. Literally, a room that has space for a small bed, that's it. Wall to wall bed.
Across the hall is a room that several of my brothers inhabited at one time or another. Whoever was living it it at the time had the most pranks played on him, due to its proximity to my room. Poor Ray, especially. He lived in it while I was in my most mischievous phase of life. Instead of getting into trouble at school or around the neighborhood, I wreaked havoc on these unsuspecting boys. I would go into Ray's room while he was sleeping and slowly drip water onto his face, or yell at him that he was late getting up and he was going to miss the bus. Once he actually fell for that one and got dressed and went upstairs and started eating a bowl of cereal at 1:30 in the morning. Other times I would pull panty hose over my face and hold a flashlight under my chin. I would then get very close to his face and make groaning noises. Ahh, the good old days!
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The Sewing Room/Laundry Room
Our last stop is our mom's sewing room/laundry room. When we moved into the house she had such great plans for this room. This was where she was going to run her designer jeans business. This is where she set up shelves so she could organize all of her fabric. She went to other great lengths to make this room a place of her own. What really happened was that it became (one of the many) catch-all places for stuff that people didn't want, or were just too lazy to put it anywhere else. The folding table, which was supposed to serve the dual purpose of folding clothes and cutting big pieces of material, turned into the great mound of wrinkled, graying (but clean!) clothes. I don't think any of us ever really got to the bottom of it; I'm sure Mom never did. What really brought this room to its lowest level was when the septic tank started backing up and sewage began gurgling up through the floor drain. This happened repeatedly over the span of probably a couple of years until Ray, the most resourceful one of us all, cut the bottom out of a 5 gallon bucket and caulked it right down to the floor with the drain in the middle. That way, whenever somebody was brushing their teeth and someone else was flushing the toilet, the vile refuse would fill the bucket up, coming alarmingly close the rim of the bucket, and then slowly drain back down until the next episode. If I happened to be in the room getting laundry and this would happen, I would gaze down into the bucket, whispering under my breath, "Pleasegodown, pleasegodown, pleasegodown."
Ray loves to tell the story about how, the day after he had installed the five gallon bucket sewage catcher, Dad wandered into the room, noticing that it was stuck to the floor. "Ohh, what the hell is this? Judas priest!" And he grunted until he had busted it off the floor. Needless to say, Ray was quite frustrated with this response, and he promptly caulked it right back down again after chastising Dad.
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Such fond memories. There are so many more things that I could say about The Basement, so many other details I've left out and events that I have skipped, but alas, if you have actually read this whole post down to this point, you certainly are weary of it. Perhaps some day I will write a sequel.
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