A Powerful Trickle

It was November 18 when I went down to the basement with the intention of getting some of the dozen broken office chairs out of there. The basement was a mess, and I thought that might be a good place to start--get big, easily carried things out so I'd have a little room to move. Our basement has been a miasma of junk for decades. The kind of thing I would close off when people came to visit, except that our guest room was downstairs, so everybody wound up seeing it and probably having to decide whether they liked us anyway. As I bent down to pick one up, I noticed a puddle on the floor. You never want to see a puddle on the floor of your basement. Tracing it back, I found that something in the kitchen plumbing had been leaking down into the basement for some time--perhaps as long as a month. I raced upstairs and found a basin my plumber had put under the water inflow tap when he replaced my faucet in late October. It was level full.  One of the new hoses he'd put in was bad. The undersink area was floating and foul. Everything was wet and it had been coming down the wall and onto the shelves on which Bill had stored many, many boxes of miscellaneous papers that described his high school, college and early work life. So many boxes of papers and photos, and most of them were sopping wet. I knew I had to go through every damn one of them.

This is the kind of thing that will spur even the most work-averse person to action: saturated boxes of stuff. Water and mildew wait for no one. Already it smelled funky. That first afternoon, I waded right in, and six hours later I had gotten the wet stuff pulled over toward the door. It was heavy, it was gross, and it was soul-sucking work. I had to save my paintings, which had been sitting in their boxes on the floor in a puddle of water for I don't know how long. I unwrapped them all, dried them off, and reboxed them. The next day I started early and ended after bedtime, and I got most of that wet wall cleared out and the shelves cleaned.

It was daunting. I took a break for a couple of days so I wouldn't lose my soul. Liam came home for Thanksgiving break. Cooking commenced. I loaded the dishwasher for the first time in months. Turned it on. Unbeknownst to me, water shot out of a huge hole in the dishwasher's drain hose, under the sink, out onto the floor, and right back down into the basement. I figured it out when Liam's feet got wet on the other side of the kitchen. This flood was ten times the size of the last one. I could not catch a break from water. Back downstairs I went, mopping, sopping, pulling stuff out of water, saving what I could, combing through things, laying things out to dry that were precious and still salvageable. Tossing. Tossing. Tossing. 

I became a drone to cleaning. It was all I could think about, all I could do. I knew that I would have to remain in this mindset until that basement was done, cleared out and cleaned. The motivation and mindset might not come around again for another 30 years, so I'd better go with it. The right bay of the garage began to fill up with junk. Ritualistically, I'd load the garden cart and haul it up the hill to the garage. Somehow that felt like getting rid of it, felt right. I was staging it for pickup, and I wanted to make pickup as easy as possible for whomever did it.

90 percent of the stuff I had to get rid of was Bill's. The extent to which he'd accumulated and squirrelled away useless crap became shockingly clear. So many boxes of papers, old love letters; none of them to or from me. Stacks of photos, feet high. Old holey T-shirts. Contractor bag after bag of clothing, bird festival shirts, things that hadn't fit him in years. Boxes to every new thing he had ever bought. Might need to return it. Save the box. Files from his work history, from school back to high school. Broken office chairs (eight!) which, rather than put in the dumpster at work, he. brought. home. and. put. in. our. basement. He didn't announce it, he just did it. He couldn't throw anything out. There were six old suitcases, each one of them, surprise! jammed with mildewed worthless clothing.  Everything he didn't want, he piled in that basement, and he never dealt with it again. When he left to go live down the road in September 2017, he took only the things he wanted--his best guitars and music equipment; his favorite clothes and shoes. The rest he left behind, never to look at it again. The rest was left to me.

This is after countless loads were taken out. I don't have photos of the basement as it was when the flooding started. Who would photograph that?

 For 27 years, I'd lived an upstairs/downstairs kind of life, trying not to see the mess in the basement, even as I kept the upstairs as clean and orderly as I could. For most of our married life, I cleaned religiously, once a week. Friends told me that was too much. I didn't see it that way. I had a job to do. As I worked on the downstairs, picking through Bill's endless crap, I came to the epiphany that this house was a perfect mirror of my parents' home. My mother was a clean freak. My dad was a creative slob. Upstairs was hers; downstairs was his.  Upstairs was warm and clean and cozy with cookies and coffee brewing and two rooms with really nice furniture that nobody much sat on, and a family room where everybody did everything, and a kitchen  always humming with industry. And then there was The Basement. There, DOD had four lathes, any number of antique gasoline engines under re-construction; walls hung with tools; boxes of who knows what...there he did his thing. Ida had to go down there to do our laundry; she had to pick her way through that miasma every day, and she couldn't do a damn thing about it, because it was all HIS.  It drove her absolutely nuts. When I was a kid, I used to wonder why she seemed to be mad at him almost all the time. I have come to the realization that it was likely that mess of a basement and all it symbolized that had her doing a slow burn, one I could smell.

We wind up living our parents' lives. I don't know how we do it, but we do.

Way back on June 15, 2018, after Bill had moved out, but before he got sick,  I got a reading from an intuitive named Ellen Bone. One of the things she said that stuck with me was that my house was upset. She told me houses have souls, and can make their feelings known. I listened, trying to imagine this. She said my house was worried that I wouldn't be able to take care of it, and worried that I was going to leave, too (Bill had been out of the house for nine months by then). Well, at that point I had my doubts as to whether I was going to be able to take care of it, too. Suddenly being charged with doing absolutely everything around here was throwing me for a loop. There was a lot of stuff Bill did that I lacked the skills or know-how to do. He'd stop over and do a few things now and then, but he had his hands full fixing up his house now. I was on my own, and this was a lot of house to handle. I was struggling with the concept of having to hire people to help me. I was overwhelmed.

This reading came back to me as I grunted and lifted and dragged crap out of the basement, mopping the wet floors and sorting through every dumb pointless box, looking for things I shouldn't toss. I thought about how not once, but twice in a row, and in completely unrelated incidents, the house took matters into its own hands, sending cascades of water down onto all the junk that was clogging its ch'i. The flooding, I realized, might have been an act of desperation on the part of a house that had simply had enough of chaos and miasma. Or it might have been chance. Bad hoses. Rotten drain tubes. Whatever. It had happened twice, and why it happened was immaterial. All that mattered was how I reacted to it. This house was calling me to arms, and I had no choice but to sign on for whatever was ahead.