Basements Are Scary

With perhaps a bit of rust on my writing joints, after nine-ish years of not really doing so, I think I am officially publicly writing again.

As far back as I can remember, basements were scary to me. I won’t ever forget the basement of our home on Lawrence Avenue when I was growing up. The house was old, but I was young, originating circa 1900 and 1970 respectively.

I was about twelve years old when we moved in. The deal was, we could live there rent-free if my dad fixed the place up. He was a carpenter. He could fix anything. Well, almost anything. He couldn’t fix my broken marriage. It took him dying unexpectedly in his sleep just to keep it together. But that’s not fixing. That’s dying.

I digress.

He fixed up many rooms in that house. It was the same for the next house we moved to. That one was on McHenry Avenue. It’s funny how life has a way of predicting itself via the names of streets you live on. I married a man by the name of Lawrence, coming from a longish line of Lawrences. There was Lawrence Jr. and Lawrence Sr. before him. Lawrence the Third would be the one I ended up meeting and one day marrying only a block or two away from that scary-basement house. We would eventually move to a town called McHenry, making it two street names that would show up again in significant ways down the road of my life.

But back to the scary basement at Lawrence Avenue. It was a two-story house. The only room I remember my dad significantly altering was the den, which also served as my parents’ bedroom. It was right off of the dining room, separated by two sliding pocket doors that met in the middle when closed for much-needed privacy from their five teenage children. I remember that room vividly. My dad constructed beautiful built-in wood shelving around the entire perimeter, complete with crown molding so that it would look original to the Victorian house. I imagine the owner wanted it to be a library for his collection of literary works after we moved out and he moved in. I pictured it filled with many books, enchanted by the thought of an entire library inside one’s own home.

I remember, as well, the adjacent aforementioned dining room. It was where my father kept his record player and all of his jazz and classical records. This was where I fell in love with Mendelssohn. Actually, it was during music class in Mrs. Veenhoven’s sixth grade music room. As part of her lesson about various instruments, she played Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream to highlight the French Horn. I was captivated and knew right then and there that I would go home and look for it in my dad’s record collection. He too owned a recording of it and allowed me to play it, and I have loved Mendelssohn ever since.

I offer these pleasant memories of that home as a contrast to the frightening memories I have of the basement there. Or, perhaps it’s my way of putting off having to describe that basement. It is locked in my memory sans description. Only a sense remains with the memory of it, and to describe it now would be to somehow change what it was to me then. Still, I will try.

I was terrified of it. I trembled having to descend the creaky, old wooden stairs that led down into its dark recesses. I don’t recall why I had to go to the basement from time to time. I only know that it was only ever per my mother’s request.

She must have stored things down there and needed something brought upstairs every so often.

What I do remember is simply the permanent parts of that dingy, dark, cobweb-infested space… the parts we did not bring with us into the house when we moved in. At the very center of the cracked and crumbling cement floor was the original furnace, or at least a very old one that had been installed many years before we arrived. It was monstrous. In size, yes. But also in its life-like characteristics. It roared, flaring up with fiery breath like an abruptly awoken dragon. I am pretty sure it hated my presence, yet it was this dragon who warned me about all the scariest of dwellers living behind it in the darkest corners of the room, dungeon-like as it was to me.

I do have a larger point to all of this. It’s this: I hate basements.

As a home builder, my father was against basements. He’d seen too many things go wrong with them structurally throughout his professional career. He felt that the best houses were the ones without a basement.

But my reasons for hating them were different.

They’ve only ever been a source of terror for me. When I was nine years old, we lived outside of town in the country. If the weather turned wicked, windy and tornadic, with little in our rural surroundings to protect us from strong storms, we’d all seven of us humans, a dog and two cats retreat to the basement to huddle under a large steel table until the danger had passed… often in the middle of the night. That was my first experience of being fearful of spiders and whatever else likes to hang out in such damp, below-ground surroundings, not to mention the fear in imagining our house above being ripped away Wizard of Oz style.

When I was in high school, we lived in a tiny ranch house. My dad fixed up a small corner of the basement, fashioning it into a bedroom, and thus, turning a three-bedroom ranch into one with four bedrooms. My oldest brother inhabited that space while my twin sister and I shared a bedroom on the main level. My parents and older sister each had the other two upstairs bedrooms. Then, after my brother moved out, my twin sister and I were eager to have our own bedrooms. I must have drawn the short straw, because she stayed upstairs, and I moved into the basement bedroom. It was novel and exciting to have my own space for about five minutes, and then I was sorely missing the natural light that came through the window of my former shared space. However long I dwelled in that new space, I did not like it and was glad to leave it when the time came to move to my college campus.

When I was living in my second apartment (which consisted of the second floor of another older home just blocks away from the Lawrence Ave. house), the street drains backed up from torrential rains, causing the basement to flood under about two feet of water, subsequently ruining everything I had in storage there. A washer and dryer, a brand new camping tent, and my husband’s (then boyfriend’s) entire expansive guitar magazine collection—something he treasured and could not replace—just to name the most valued of losses.

In our first purchased home after marrying, we had the unfortunate incident of a crow flying down through the furnace’s chimney into the furnace itself and getting stuck, at which point it died because the flames could reach its feathers, charring the bird to death. I will never forget that most horrible stench of burning crow flesh.

So, you see, basements and I are not on very good terms. I have never lived in a house that had a finished basement. (What a funny way to say a space has been made livable. Finished. We don’t live in unfinished above-ground dwellings. Yet we don’t call these spaces finished.)

Started. That’s all my basements have ever been. Unpolished. These have been the spaces where everything goes to die. Forgotten. Flooded. Burned. Buried. Infested with the creepy-crawly. Where everything ugly gets hidden. It’s where we stuff the things we think we’ll need but don’t. We wash our dirty laundry there. Or let it pile up. It’s where we store the think-we-might-needs and the sentimental know-we’ll-never-again-needs. And everything in between.

It’s cold and damp. It’s where the tools are kept that we’ll need for fixing broken things. I imagine it’s where my dad stored his carpentry tools to fix up that house that allowed us to live rent-free. Tools that could fix up an old house, but not mend relationships.

It’s no surprise that one of my most repeated and unpleasant dreams takes place in a basement. It’s a place of dread for me in real life, and it became the dreaded space in my recurring dream as well. In it, I seem to be forever stuck in my basement, moving from cluttered storage areas to piles of laundry that never go away, no matter how many loads I wash, to a corner under construction (waiting to be finished like its sibling spaces upstairs). There’s even an enclosed room in this fictitious dream basement that is locked… forbidden to enter. I’ve never dared try to figure out what that part of the dream is about.

The house I live in now has the nicest basement of any I have ever lived in. But it has seen its share of peril too. Mostly stressful standing-water-related issues. And clutter.

Basements are like the lower regions of the heart. They are where things go to be forgotten, whether intentionally or not.

I have a nasty, cluttered basement in my heart. Everything I have ever needed to suppress goes there. Pain, loss, longing. It’s where things go to die. Memories. Hopes. I don’t mean to paint a dismal picture. I like to think there’s a garden in the upper chambers of my heart. I fill it with the flowers of art and nature and music and friendship. But I realized today, there’s a basement as well. And like the eighth symphony of my favorite composer, it too is unfinished.

My dog needed to be groomed today. But I hadn’t put her most recent rabies tag on her collar yet. It is somewhere in the basement. I know, because this is where everything goes when people are going to be visiting and I haven’t carved out enough time to properly clean. So the last time a guest came to stay with us, I threw all of the upstairs mess and clutter into bins and brought them to the basement to be hidden away.

“Look at my home, Guest. It’s clean and clutter-free. I live an ordered and simple life as evidenced by my tidy upstairs dwellings.” I don’t know that I fooled anyone, but that was my intent. Hide the mess and hopefully no one will notice that it’s still very much there.

My therapist had to point out to me this week that this is what I do. Actually, she had to remind me, as I already knew, deep in my heart— somewhere down where I suppress all the other things I don’t want to think about—that this is my MO. I hide my messes—out of shame. I buy new winter coats to cover the mess that is me. I move the unwanted clutter of everything that isn’t aesthetically pleasing into the dungeon. While I might have already known this about myself, what I didn’t know is that shame grows in the dark, so hiding the messes we are ashamed of only breeds more shame, in the same way, I suppose, that lack of light helps make it easier for basement mold or mildew to grow. My therapist told me this about shame on Wednesday night. And I believe her. I think she’d know. She’s probably seen a great deal of self-shaming come through her office over the years. And compassionately, she wants people to bring their self-shame out in the open so it won’t grow. She wants them to be in the light of community with safe people who are not afraid of others’ messes, usually because they have their own and can offer empathy and compassion. She wanted me to bring mine out in the open in my next Monday-night group therapy.

Nothing terrifies me more. Not even fire-breathing dragons.

The list of things living (or dying) in the basement of my heart are far too… well, shameful. I cannot show this to others. I am too ashamed.

Right now, it is my grief that I am stuffing down deep. I do this every November, ever since my daughter died. She actually died in December, but November is always the point at which the grief is stirred up again, triggered (I assume) by the start of the holiday season. Or perhaps it’s just the change in the air and November’s suddenly diminished amount of daylight that stirs it up again.

Whatever the case, the shame comes in feeling that I’m failing everyone (especially my living child, and perhaps even my dead one) if I cannot get into the holiday spirit. I feel tremendous guilt that, even five—eight, nine, ten—eleven years out, I cannot overcome my loss and get my shit together and do the holidays like normal people do. That sounds harsh, I know. That is what my self-shame sounds like. And it gets worse every year.

And my therapist wants me to dig it out of the bin that I’ve buried it in all these months, since the last holiday season in which I also couldn’t get my shit together, then bring it to therapy (with six other women who also have messes) and expose it.

This produces a great deal of anxiety for me, because I recently bought a new coat and I wear it like a lie that I have my life all tidy, neat and ordered… all wrapped up in a pretty holiday bow. All the while, underneath that new coat, I am falling swiftly apart. In the space of one week I went from treading water to feeling like I’m going under.

I had plans. I was going to make it through November unscathed, sans grief… or at least on higher ground than the last one. I did everything I could think of to make sure of that. I bought many books. I started meditating. But, nope.

I fell back into November’s hole… into the clutches of the fire-breathing dragon that grief often is.

Agreeing to host Thanksgiving, I think, is what did me in this year. I have a great many literal and heart messes to hide, and not enough time to hide them—not even enough space left in the scary basements if I did have the time. I waited too long. I was in denial of my mess.

And just like I feel with my own unkempt self, I felt it necessary to have my dog groomed for thanksgiving… so as to impress others… impress upon them that we have our dog regularly groomed, even though we do not. Thus the need for her most current dog tag… so the groomers would be aware that she’s up to date on her shots.

So this morning, I put on my big-girl pants and descended—like my twelve-year-old self used to do—into my scary basement to search for it in some bin among many. Immediately (only one bin in), I began to feel an uprising—an attack of anxiety as vicious as the basement dwellers I imagined were lurking at Lawrence Avenue. All I could see around me was the sea of clutter, both literal and figurative, stuffed down into hiding. I was overwhelmed by the necessity to find something that was needed in a place that, in complete denial, is ignored most months of the year.

But no matter how much you ignore the existence of such spaces, there are just some things (like grief, procrastination and shame) that, despite how hard you try to suppress them or stuff them down, rear their ugly heads. They bubble up like lava from the volcanic cellars of our lives.

And you can do nothing but wait… for spring and for the scalding lava to cool and harden like the cold cement of your basement floor.

Then, you look behind—from whence you came—for those creaky, old wooden stairs.

And you climb back out of the basement… once again.

iPhone-made photo of my young son at the top of our basement stairs, waiting for me to finish cleaning so that I could come upstairs to dance with him

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As you may have noticed, most of the photos I used today were not of my basement. Being that I am (predominantly) a nature photographer, I don’t make a habit of creating photographs in my basement. But I do remember taking a few here and there, some with my iPhone, others with my Nikon. I’ve included them below.

My choice to use the nature photographs above was in part because I have wanted to share them here for a while now, as they are some of my favorite images I have ever made of the outdoors, and some of the only photos I have ever made in the month of November. The other reason is because these were taken on the last day of November in 2014, almost exactly one year after my daughter died. While searching for my basement photos on Instagram, I came across these foggy-November-morning photos in a brief post I’d written about why this month tends to be so difficult for me. They were originally published in a post I’d written for my old blog the same day I made them, where the entire series of photos can be seen.

I get that this isn’t the lightest of topics. But my hope in writing it out is that it will have the same effect as sharing it in group therapy… bringing it into the light of community so that the shame will not grow.

And now, for some lightness (and so that I can show basements aren’t entirely a source of terror or dread for me), here are the basement photographs I made over the years in my current home, all of my little guy who, thankfully, has never been as afraid of basements as my young self used to be.

My son wearing his dad’s Viking hat—original caption here.

Coloring in the basement—original caption here.

Playing Nintendo Switch in a new-to-us vintage chair—original caption here.

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One last thing… I thought I would include the beautiful Mendelssohn piece I referred to above…

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Incidental Music, Op. 61, MWV M 13: No. 7 Notturno