This post over at Bumblebee Sweet Potato had me recalling my own and my family’s own experience with an unfinished basement.

We moved to Hermann, MO when I was in the 8th grade. Mom and Dad purchased a fairly new house which they wound up selling a couple years later, precipating our move more into town into an older, brick house. The house was about 70 years old and had been built by the owner who was terrible at plumbing. And we had an unfinished basement.

To be more precise the basement was in three sections: a root cellar dug into the hard-packed earth and later lined with metal shelves that at one time held canned food. Another part was the oil tanker room that held the large oil tank for our heating fuel. This room was also dug into the earth which was hard-packed dirt and a dirt floor. The actual basement that served as the house’s foundation was stone, later shored up by cement. I always felt that the root cellar and the oil tanker room walls were more stable looking than the foundation.

There were two ways to access the basement. One was from a back door beside the porch and “sunk” into the driveway. This door had a lock on it we’d never been able to break. If my dad had been a handyman, he probably would have broken down the shoddy door and just replaced it. As it was, we couldn’t afford to do anything with it so it was left as it, to continue rotting. The other access was from the ground floor kitchen. This door, like the other doors in the house, had a lock accessed by a skeleton key. We kept it locked as “extra security” against the rotting downstairs door.

Other features of this basement were an unfinished bathroom toward the back corner, opposite the oil tanker room, a giant, stain-rusted porcelain sink with faucets so rusty they no longer worked. And finally, the washer and dryer.

There was another section of the basement, that lined the left underside of the house. In this section was a basement fireplace, acoustical ceiling, and some bad tile on the floor. My parents had hopes we kids would take that part of the basement as ours to play in and bring friends to. It never really happened.

Mom had a routine of us kids tossing our laundry from the second floor down the stairs when we came home from school. She would gather it, head downstairs, and add it to any accumulating laundry in the basement. A few months of this and mom began asking me or my brother Jack to take laundry down to the basement. For awhile we did the chore, but at one point, we got to just throwing the clothes at the bottom of the basement steps. Not a smart thing because when it rained, we’d get leakage where those clothes were. The gathering of those clothes and doing the laundry became one of those “do it only when absolutely needed” things.

I can recall many times dad griping about the laundry at the foot of the stairs. After much grumbling, if mom didn’t go and take care of it, either I did or my brother did. Due to the rain leakage, often the laundry stack was wet, smelly, and yucky. I’d have to pick up that mess, throw it into the washer as quickly as possible, clean up the moisture at the bottom of the stiars, and run back up the stairs as quickly as I could.

My family weren’t slobs. For the most part, we kept the house clean. My brothers and I were all teens, so of course each of us had our various bedroom disasters, but even our rooms had some semblance of order. I think about this house now, and all the times we had the laundry at the foot of the basement stairs, and it still appalls me.

A few years later, after my parents divorce, various conversations settled on that second house in Hermann, and the basement. One by one my brothers, my dad and my mom all revealed that the basement weirded them out. Something felt “wrong” about it. None of us ever came to any conclusion (such as maybe it was haunted or some such thing as that). It just became one of those oddities that once it came out in the open, we never really mentioned it again. It was, when we had talked, a source of tentative awe, amazement that we all had felt it, and nervous laughter that signalled us to just forget about it.

My brothers no longer remember much about it. If I press the issue, it’s nonsense. My dad is long gone. My mom just says it was old and unpleasant, and that’s that. Me? I don’t know. I just know I’ll never own a house with an unfinished basement because that one was more than unpleasant… it was WRONG.

What normal, everyday thing scares you?

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 18th, 2006 at 12:06 pm and is filed under About Me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.