Notes from Maine - 2021/04/18
Do you have a basement? What’s it like?
When I was growing up, we had a little TV room down in the southwest corner of basement. That house had a concrete foundation. I think the walls in the TV room were panelling? I don’t remember. The rest of the basement was a workshop and a laundry room. It was pretty utilitarian in retrospect. As a kid, it seemed like regular living space. Later, my parents had parts of the basement “finished,” putting in a bedroom and bath. Water would seep through the foundation walls in the bedroom, soaking the carpet. I think if I could go back, I would consider it a humid, dirty, moldy place. Crickets hiding in dark corners would chirp during TV shows. Sometimes a bug would crawl out on a million slithery legs. Going into a basement like that is like putting on a damp jacket. You have to get used to it, and then it’s fine.
In Maine, a lot of the cellars are pretty gnarly. This house was built two-hundred years ago, so the old foundation is made of giant stone slabs. The floor is uneven dirt. There’s enough height to stand, but you’ll be walking through he cobwebs hanging from the big timbers above.
There are a million cracks for mice to slip through. The snakes that chase them find a happy home in those crevices as well. Sometimes when I’m dusting or vacuuming, I think of the unfinished space below me. I’m trying to keep the living space reasonably clean and tidy, but it’s built over dirt, rocks, mice, spiders, snakes, and worms. The civilized part of the house is an illusion suspended over that chaos. I’m just keeping it propped up temporarily. It will crumble back into the dirt eventually, and the clean spot will be erased.
A while back, I talked about houses that seem alive. There are plenty of dead, sterile buildings, but other places breathe and decay. When the night is quiet enough, you can hear the heartbeat. I wrote a story about one of those places, called Mumma’s House. In that book, I explore a house that’s connected to a family, and the family that’s bound to the house. I enjoy a story where each character has a rich history and we get glimpses of the past along the way.
