Subterranean Blues

I’ve always had a sort of love-hate relationship with my basement. Lately, though, as we get ready for our major downsizing move from this house with its basement to a city apartment without one, my relationship has become more complicated.

Truth is, aside from a few apartments back in my 20s, I’ve never lived in a house without a basement. To me, a house tacked smack onto a concrete slab has always seemed like a house without bones, without the foundation needed to carry a house’s weight, its heft of joy or burden of sorrows within. A basement is where we retreat when weather threatens. Or head for when mechanical problems compromise comfort. There we may choose to create a playroom, a workroom, a place to jog our hearts into shape. In a crowded house, it’s where a child might go to seek privacy and quiet.

Almost always though it’s where we keep stuff. Lots of stuff. As I’m finding out as we get ready for our January move and for the first time in decades, I’ll have no basement -- or what, at the moment, after 17 years of residence here, bears more resemblance to an archaeological dig.

True, our house on the island is not without its bones. Chalk it up to regional parlance perhaps, but what here in my native Midwest is a basement I decline to call there anything but a cellar. Maybe such differentiating nomenclature is also a matter of use, purpose, and structure. Or it originates in the more direct lineage to the old  indigenous root cellars of New England Capes or saltwater farmhouses, those subterranean vaults of a garden’s late summer bounty and an orchard’s autumn apples, their stocked shelves a jewel-colored, Mason-jarred testimonial to hours spent over steaming vats.

Originally, before some recent house renovation, our island cellar was a little creepy. Cool and dark, its only light came by way of two pull chain light bulbs and three small windows. Inexplicable wet spots bloomed near drains. One particularly dark corner was home to a few desiccated mice remains each spring. Once, a salamander that must’ve squeezed in through a screen seemed happily adjusted to life on a sweating pipe. At one end of our cellar, the floor slopes upward to follow the contour of the underlying granite ledge, a place where not even I of modest height can comfortably stand upright. And though now less damp and better lit, it remains a place of pure function, a netherworld of pipes and drains, boilers and pumps, electrical boxes and switches. On this foundation, my house of light and energy and dreams stands.

And though bearing little resemblance, our cellar is a distant cousin to this Illinois basement, a well-lit place of bookshelves and treadmill, of washing machine and cedar closet. Of storage bins and boxes brimming with the significant and not-so, the old and not quite new, the useful and the – really? to no one? – useless. Both also possess direct linkage to my childhood home’s basement with its knotty-pine-paneled rec room with TV and wet bar, that cool subterranean place of my adolescence’s hot summer afternoon chore – ironing primer pillowcases and handkerchiefs. A place that other afternoons just as easily morphed into the stage for another solo re-invention of my teen-age self, when, to one of my cranked up 45s, I belted out the lyrics to Petula Clark’s “Downtown” or with the soundtrack of “West Side Story” blaring, I strutted across the tiled floor not as a heart-broken Maria but a defiant, swaggering Jet, all while my family upstairs went about their obviously more mundane lives.

I’ve always thought that to become intimate with a house is to know in which corners at which times of day the sun shines its warmest light, to know the sound of rain unique to a particular place on the roof, to be certain when the wind howls where the house creaks its loudest or moans at its highest pitch, and in a storm, beneath which doors or windows water may seep. To know its bones. Its basement and attic.

I’ve never lived in a house with an attic. And yet for many years, an attic has been vividly present in my head. There it resides with its exposed bones-of-the-house rafters and prickly sheets of insulation. An old lamp sits atop a chest shoved beneath steeply canted eaves among boxes, garment bags and trunks. Through a small unwashed window, sunlight, even on the brightest afternoons, only dimly peeks. It’s a dusty and cob-webbed place, the air hot and stifling, an oppression that in summer an attic fan does little to disperse. All of this is so clear to me, it’s as if my mounting narrow steep stairs into a dimly lit attic with loose floorboards protesting beneath my feet has been physically inscribed deep within my body. Or should have been.

At this point in my life, I doubt attics are in my future. But I’ve been lucky to possess basements, each of which, through various experiences, have been physically impressed on tissue and bone so that each time I climb the stairs of our dark island cellar empty-handed, I’m carrying up a load of warm laundry, a garment bag of winter woolens, a box of Christmas decorations from my Midwest basement. Or I’m sweating from my last invigorating performance to 45 or 78 even if, with a heavy cellar door thunking shut behind me, I enter a bright, light-filled house that by its architectural style and surely its location on the edge of an edge of an island resembles no house I’ve ever before called home.

Customarily, this is the time of year when from our basement I haul out the Christmas decorations, dust off the gingerbread men cookie cutters, make lists, and try to resist but, when faced with the reality of several teen-agers’ wish lists, ultimately succumb to the pull of the mall and then back home puzzle over when I’ll have time to box and wrap it all. Instead, this year, as we get ready for our major move, my lists are of another sort. The boxes I haul up are not what will decorate this house or wrap gifts to place beneath this year’s non-existent tree. Instead the boxes contain what will not be kept, will not go to apartment or island house. Such discard and dismantling is supposed to unburden, lighten – possibly enlighten? – but I’m still not so sure. Of course some of it – okay, a lot of it – is just stuff. And of that it’s easy to let go amid the incredulous questioning: “How on earth did we manage to keep all this?” And yet, regardless what’s unearthed, it’s impossible not to recognize in it this transition. This letting go. Of not just stuff but pieces, vessels, remnants of lives lived. Of what indeed are or could be stories uncovered like those revealed at an archeological dig -- or when poking around in the innards of a long-inhabited house.

At times I have resented my basement and the ease with which it accepts whatever I have entrusted to its care or, too mindlessly, tossed its way. But I will miss it – not just because of its tantalizing amount of storage, the sprawl of its laundry area and convenience of deep wash tubs, its well-lit home to treadmill and cedar-closeted off-season clothes, but also for its temptation of never having to decide today what on some future tomorrow you will find you must either keep or toss, must donate or sell or give away. Not until, emptied of all contents, you climb its stairs for the last time.