We have been in one of those weather patterns lately where every evening seems to arrive with a question mark attached. Will it storm tonight? Will it miss us? Will the radar light up again with yellow and red pockets wandering across the map like they have business here? Some weeks it feels like the sky keeps clearing its throat.
This is also the season when I've had more help in the house than usual. Things have been clean, moved, sorted, lifted, carried, and made better. I'm deeply satisfied when I watch a room become itself again. Today my air conditioner repairman had to go down into my old basement here. That basement is not part of the house in any pleasant sense. The basement is under the house, yes, but that is about all the hospitality it offers. My son and I moved the entrance so that we no longer had to go down from the inside of the kitchen. So now we go outside first, then down into that separate underworld of dampness, age, pipes, cinderblocks, shadow, and the sort of atmosphere that makes a person grateful to be upstairs instead. And it's not a room; it is a condition.
The mere mention of basements and storms takes my mind straight back to another house, my home on the corner, to another season of my life. Years ago, not long after my dad died, I moved in with mom because she had gone to pieces in the way people do when the center of their lives is suddenly gone. My house up north was still my house, but I was not really living in it the way I had before. I sometimes went back-and-forth, teaching school, staying here nights, trying to take care of mom, trying to keep too many things from falling apart at once. My son continued to live in that house up north.
That October mom's doll club was scheduled to meet at my house. I was giving the program on fairies and fairy dolls. I had planned it carefully because that was the kind of thing I love doing. I had created little handouts and favors, fairy touches, and many different stories of original fairy dolls. On the day of the doll club, I took a personal day from school so I could host this event properly in my home. my son had agreed to clean up the house for me. Now, to be fair to him, I believe he honestly thought he had cleaned it. This is one of those great differences between mothers and sons, or perhaps between women expecting company and young men who have never feared the judgment of a baseboard. He had done what looked to him like cleaning. I came home from school, expecting only to make refreshments, put on the final touches, and come stay with my mom. I discovered that his definition and mine had not met for coffee.
So I cleaned. I cleaned all evening. I cleaned all night. I cleaned the way younger women can clean when it's really necessary. My son went to stay with my mom, and I believe the two of them had a pretty good evening together. Although my mom had lost her whole world when my dad died, she still always managed to keep it together around my son. I am sure she fixed him a lovely supper, and the two of them watched something like Shirley Temple.
The next day, the doll club ladies came. The program went well. I can still remember sitting in my living room with my fairy things all around me. It was one of those moments when the house felt full in the old-fashioned way – women gathered, little square crystal snack trays and cups, a program given, my mother present, everything respectful enough to pass muster.
Then the storm came. Not just rain. Not just a little thunder, a real daytime storm…. dark and alarming. The kind that makes the air feel charged before the sirens or warnings. Before long, the weather alerts were not simply suggesting caution. We were under a tornado warning. And naturally the ladies began talking about going to my basement. This would've been the sensible thing to do. Unfortunately, my basement was not ready for sensible. It was not merely untidy. It was a basement with a very dark history. It was a working basement. A boy basement. A place where things had been stored, forgotten, dragged, repaired, abandoned, and possibly created for an experiment. It was not a location I intended to unveil during a doll club meeting after 24 hours of cleaning and a fairy program. Well, I had cleaned the visible world. I had not cleaned the underworld. So when the suggestion gathered momentum – when the ladies began saying that we really should go downstairs– my exhausted hostess brain made an executive decision. As I remember it, I said something along the lines of, "Sorry, ladies, we're not going to the basement. We may just have to put our heads between our knees and kiss our tails goodbye, but we're not going to my basement." I cannot swear to the exact wording after all these years. Memory keeps the spirit of a line better than the transcript. I do so remember the feeling after the words left my mouth. I was appalled. My mother? Well, she was more appalled. My mom had beautiful ice-blue eyes. They could be soft, but they could also snap. At that moment, they snapped with a full force of maternal horror.
There was dead silence for a little while. Then one of the ladies, Artie Miller, began to laugh. Not loudly at first. Just a little startled laugh, the kind that gives everyone else permission to breathe again. Then others laughed too, and the room loosened. The storm went on doing whatever storms do, but the doll club did not descend into the basement, and those blue eyes softened just a touch. We stayed above ground with our fairy dolls. Everyone survived. The basement remained unseen. I think about that now in this current season of storm warnings and repairman and houses being cleaned in stages.
There is always, it seems, some basement we do not want anyone to see. Sometimes it is literal: damp, old, and better entered from outside. Sometimes it is the private chaos beneath the presentable rooms. Sometimes it is memory itself. We show people the room we have prepared, the table we have set, the flowers we have arranged, the clean-enough version of our lives. Underneath, there may be grief, clutter, old dampness, unfinished work, and things we meant to tend years ago. And then the storm comes, and someone says that we should probably go down.
Maybe that is why this old story stays with me. It is funny, yes. I still laugh when I remember my no-sleep self choosing possible tornado over possible basement tour. But it is also tender to me now. My son was young, and he thought he had helped. My mother had lost her husband, but she still made room for an evening of fun with him. My mother was trying desperately to remain my mother while her own world had cracked open. I was trying to host a doll club program while holding together a life that had changed overnight.
The house was clean enough. The program was OK. The ladies laughed. The storm passed. And the basement, mercifully , kept its dark secrets.
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