I suspect we keep it to preserve memories and to stave off the responsibility of making a decision we fear we may later regret, but whatever our reasoning, there comes a time when the most stalwart collector says, "Enough!" I mention this because this year I have said the word.
My mother's basement was a place of fascination for me as a child. The rest of our house was such a wreck that I never saw the basement as anything but a continuation of the rest of it. I loved the smell down there. The earthen floor showed beneath cracked bricks and a poor attempt to spread some concrete over it all. An open crawl space with cracks of light attesting to the less than air-tight foundation allowed small green things to grow, and at one time there was a seven foot Tree of Heaven sapling growing sideways that protruded into the basement. I remember suggesting ways my dad could cut down that tree, the problem being that he was decidedly round and couldn't fit into the tiny crawl space to carry out any of them. The fact that it's not a fifty foot tree today, and in fact is gone, is testament to someone's cleverness in removing it.
Our childhood black cat Princess loved exploring the crawl space because it was like any other dark, mysterious, earthy place and it probably had rodents which she loved to hunt. I remember trying to lure her out of there, sometimes being successful. She ended up dying because of something she ate in the basement.
Our house has Michigan banks, which are not money-storing devices invented by backwoods Michigan folk, but are four to five foot tall brick ledges, also four to five feet deep in places. I'm not sure why they were popular, but I would guess they provided a good place to store things such as jars of home canned vegetables and fruit and anything else, especially if there wasn't a garage.
Our banks lined both rooms of our basement. I suspect there once was a door between the two rooms because there is still a free standing doorway in the middle of the room today. My dad nailed a couple of cheap Montgomery Ward metal kitchen cabinets to it for additional storage, but it's obviously a wooden doorway.
As a kid, I saw the items piled on the banks as pieces of our history, and I was right. There were old farm tools, stacks of chipped plates and saucers and bowls, large and small kraut crocks, one big enough for a three year old to sit in, and there was a mysterious glass jug imprisoned in a wooden crate that appeared to have been purposely built around it. Antique fishbowls, lamps, a chamber pot, scrap lumber, good lumber, bottles marked "poison" alongside jars of canned peaches collected the dust of years on those banks. On one bank was a vast collection of returnable empty glass pop bottles which I slowly diverted to the local corner grocery store over the years in exchange for candy and pocket money for my Saturday treks downtown.
Probably the most intriguing thing for me, though, was the bricked up doorway under the basement stairs. There was a large, rounded brick step up and then a bricked up doorway. No one ever told me why it was there, and from the time I discovered it, it became a source of speculation and daydreaming for me.
When I asked my mother, she shrugged me off, and I got the impression it was a family secret. You should never ignore a kid's question more than once. Ten year olds have incredibly fertile imaginations, not to mention fairly poor reasoning powers, and they can come to some pretty weird conclusions.
I became hesitant to go downstairs alone. I'd grab one of my little sisters (as if they could or would protect me from a drooling ghoul) and make up some excuse of wanting to show them something. Or I'd go down when my mother was doing battle with the wringer washing machine or my dad was tinkering around on his tool bench. Never would I go down there after dark or if I was the only one at home. Never would I go down there if I heard a loud clunk or thump or clanging sound or creaking board.
Today, the basement is much the same as it used to be. It still smells old and musty. The Michigan banks are crumbling but still standing, a tribute to the guy who built them over a century ago. The crappy concrete job on the floor is really coming apart, and the ancient red bricks beneath are more and more visible. The largest kraut crock and the mysterious bottle in the wooden crate are gone, stolen by a workman who came to do repairs once.
When we moved in seven years ago, we were guests in a way. It was still my mother's house. In these seven years she has become helpless, and the burden of de-junking the house has fallen to us. We have successfully de-junked the entire house, saving the good, tossing the broken, the greasy, the useless, but the basement is still a sinkhole of procrastination. Maybe it's because I have such vivid memories of imagined mystery, or maybe it's because it is such an overwhelming task because it hasn't been properly sorted or maintained since my dad died thirty years ago.
On several banks are stored more than a hundred canning jars filled with canned tomatoes, peaches, green beans, and applesauce, now blackened with time until they look like something Dr. Jekyle would have concocted. Gary has been hauling some of them up on trash day all winter. Happily, they are nearly gone. My nephew Isaac has been helping me with the basement this year, hauling endless boxes of trash up to wait for the trash man or pickers, whomever ever gets to it first. Last fall we finally got rid of my mother's broken fan collection. Even Isaac, who loves to explore the basement as I used to, couldn't understand why anyone would save five box fans and ten oscillating fans, all of which didn't work. We found bits and pieces of broken and rotting furniture, rusty metal bed springs, broken umbrellas and lamps, boxes of old clothing, musty beyond washing from years on a bank. By the time we finished hauling junk up, we had lined nearly the length of the property line on Campbell Street, a full one hundred fifty feet.
Today, we are tackling another day of marathon sorting and trashing, and though it is unpleasant and dirty, it will have an end. Someday, the basement will be empty and so will the house. We will vacate this shell of what was our family home for nearly one hundred years, the only family home that my sisters and our children and grandchildren have known. It will no longer be our responsibility to care for nor our right to inhabit.
It occurs to me that our lives are like this. We have one life. We either fill it with good and productive things, regularly cleaning out the bad, airing any dirty corners to the sun, taking inventory of what is there, or we let the crud accumulate, thinking at first that it isn't so bad then procrastinating about doing anything to fix it until it is such an overwhelming task that we don't know where to begin. We all know people who are carrying baggage and chains. Dickens' CHRISTMAS CAROL aptly portrays the soul burdened down by chains of one's own making.
The beauty of the Christian faith is the concept of forgiveness and redemption, of being made clean and whole, of having the basements of our lives emptied of the rubbish that has accumulated there. For some, it is the memories that hurtfully linger and so we store them under the basement stairs. For others it is things we have done wrong that we aren't ready to get rid of so we store them on the banks next to the jars of rotten fruit and vegetables. For others it is the inability to decide that keeps theirr lives in a state of crumbing brick like the old floors, and we can't seem to find the time or energy to do anything about it.
Some years ago, Valparaiso University professor Walter Wangerin wrote a story called, "The Ragman, The Christ" in which a mysterious rag man wanders through city streets offering new items for old. The story steps beyond our imagination when the Ragman takes a man's wounds and gives him wholeness. This continues until the Ragman, broken and bleeding, shoeless and shirtless from giving away all that he has and is staggers into a junk yard and dies in the backseat of a wrecked car. Three days later, as the dawn's rays are starting to illuminate the junkyard, the Ragman gloriously appears, whole and shining.
We all have junk we need to take out for the trashman. And we all have junk we need to take to the Ragman, the Christ. There will be no trash in heaven. Wouldn't it be great to get rid of it now?
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