One morning this week I was woken up at 6 a.m. by my sump pump starting up in the basement. All the snow was melting and we had some rain during the night, so that triggered it.
This part of upstate New York is known for flooding and water in basements. The underground shale formations shift. Our creeks overflow.
The previous house we lived in had a sump pump when we bought it. That basement periodically had water in it, too. One contractor suggested some drainage ditches, so we tried that. Another suggested new gutters on the roof. We sold the house shortly after that, so I don’t know if the gutters were a permanent solution.
When we had this house and studio built eight years ago, the builder assured me our basement would be dry, and it was for a while.
One night as my artist group was having its monthly meeting in the studio, Adrian came in and said, “There’s water in the basement.”
He said it calmly, but as we all trooped downstairs, everyone was horrified to see water gushing out of a hole in the wall, heading toward my supply of shipping boxes. As my friends quickly moved the boxes and other storage to the dry side of the basement, I called my contractor. He told me to stuff rags in the hole until he could get there.
It worked.
Later that week, my grandkids helped me clean all the wooden palettes with a mixture of water and bleach, and to mop up the floor. The basement remained dry for several years after that.
I hate basements to start with, mainly because that’s where the spiders like to live. The basement of the house I grew up in was low ceilinged, dark, and musty. We spent a lot of time down there playing ping-pong, foosball, and the pin-ball machine my brother had rigged up, but I didn’t have to be down there alone.
Since Adrian died, I have this basement all to myself.
When you live in the south, you don’t have to deal with basements. The spiders are happy to join you on the main floor.
We had only a crawl space in our Kentucky house, and I wasn’t the one who had to crawl into it. Basements are a northern fixture, designed to help insulate the house above them. Basements are always a little warmer in the winter and a little cooler in the summer—a good place to store your potatoes.
I try to ignore my basement now, but during the last year of Adrian’s life, it wouldn’t let me. As our lives became more desperate upstairs, flooding in the basement destroyed whatever was downstairs. It’s one way to clean out the detritus of your life.
The summer after Adrian died, my granddaughter Rachel helped me drag everything upstairs—all the boxes of papers we’d never opened from previous moves—wet drawings—unused camping equipment—old blankets . . . .
Adrian and I were not hoarders and had dispatched a good deal of our unused possessions with each move we’d made over the years. Yet still, one always accumulates.
Over the years of flooding we’d gotten rid of the treadmill he insisted on using even after falling on it. The only thing of real value down there was (and still is) the beautiful ping-pong table we bought when the house was built. Adrian played every day as long as he possibly could.
The ping-pong table sits idle most of the time now. Rachel plays with me on occasion, and her brother, too, when he visits.
That summer of basement clean up, Rachel and I pared down my life’s history as we threw out box after box of wet stuff. Among the ruined papers in the bottom drawer of a rusting filing cabinet, I found a few old letters from Adrian that he wrote to me 35 years ago.
Before destroying the damp pages, I entered his loving words into my computer, and cried.
