Creations flow out from us and back in….
as therapeutic as nature and love.
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I spent the whole day today, nearly, in front of the computer, trying to transport an old blog into this one. Apparently for me at this time, it's not possible. As I went along with the impossible project, I found in reading the past blogs that the memories are very fresh and present. Like the smell of my parents' basement can make my whole childhood flash before my eyes.
One year, right before a family reunion we had planned for our 90 year old mom (the same mom in the stroke recovery section of this website), and also right before we would need to start our grieving over the sale of our childhood home, my brother Mike plotted a gift for all us kids and our kids, who also loved the smell of that basement. To enter the house on Ketewomoke Drive, we all used the basement door when we grew up and later when we came to visit. When we were kids, there were big double wooden doors, barn-red, that opened into the concrete underbelly of the house. There was a steep set of wooden steps going up to the hallway. When we got older, the double barn door was replaced with a regular door, but the smell never changed, no matter how many house renovations and improvement were done over the years. After visits, my children and I used to arrive back home in California, open our suitcases and inhale that smell that we carried back, missing the place and the people and the beach already. The house was mostly ground level, but the ground is hilly on sweet sandy Long Island, so there was only basement under half the house. A beautiful stone fireplace was originally used for heat. Its stone foundation sat on the floor of the basement beneath. At some point in the house history, someone added a coal burning furnace that was replaced with an oil burner when we bought the house in the mid-1950s. My brother Bobby and I used to play down there, where the concrete slope of the floor went up steep enough that it was hard to climb up it (which in reality was only about 4' high; oer my head for sure) and merged into the dirt of the ground. The basement ceiling met the underfloor of the house there. The stone foundation of the fire place sat right at that slope with a dark space behind it. Very scary. Very dark. Very thrilling. The area was still filled with enough coal debris and coal dust, that we came out of there covered in oily black. The experience enabled me to understand the coal covered faces of miners I saw in pictures. I also understood the impact on their lungs. I remember the bathtub ring being oily and black. Of course, we were not supposed to play in there. And, of course, we always got caught. So, back to the story. Mike decided to take a whole batch of small white hand-towels down to the basement, and leave them there until they soaked up the smell. I mean, everything else soaked it up, even the upstairs, so I can see how he thought it might work. At some point he thought they were saturated, and quickly sealed them up in zip-lock bags. When everyone came from NY to CA for the 90th Birthday reunion, which included kids, grand-kids and great grand-kids, he brought the towels in the sealed bags. We all gathered around as he brought them out, one for each of us. Wonderful... we opened them very quickly and closed them up just as fast to keep the small in. As we inhaled, all those individual and unique childhoods at Ketewomoke Drive rose up and mingled together as we sat surrounding my mom, who was always a little more than puzzled by our love of the basement smell. |
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