Time, Space, and Shape

This will sound a little odd to say, but I have been to Beverly’s basement, and I have to admit that I was a little touched by it.

Normally, visiting someone’s basement is not necessarily any kind of learning experience, or something that prompts any contemplation. Mention the word “basement” to most people and the mental image conjured up is usually less than ideal. Most of the time we imagine something dimly lit at best, cool and often damp, with an unmistakable musty smell we often connect with what we picture through some olfactory memory. Many of us have either lived in an older home or known someone who has, and our experience has helped create that image for us.

But, for me, Beverly’s basement was a little bit of a different experience. I think it would be for just about anyone that would have the opportunity to visit it.

My chance visit to this unique space happened just the other day, when—as luck would have it—the downstairs refrigerator at Bill and Mary’s went on the fritz. The girls and I were staying with Bill and Mary the first few days we were in Kansas City for my long-planned high school reunion, and enjoying the time in their “old/new” home.

There was frozen food stored in the downstairs fridge, and that food would spoil in the time it would take any repairman to respond, which would mean there would be loss, or worse (in Mary’s mind), there would be waste, and so the best and most reasonable response would be to load up all of the food and hike it to Beverly's house around the corner. Beverly was an older friend of Bill and Mary’s, the mother of one of our high school friends, Bart, who has lived in her home some forty-odd years there in Parkville, and she had ample space in her basement freezer to accommodate Mary’s food.

Mary and I loaded up a couple of coolers worth of frozen items, plopped them into the back seat of my car, and headed down their steep hill to main, over one block, and then back up the steep hill to Beverly’s address. Beverly was there to greet us at the gate before we even got out of the car to unload the coolers, as was Barney, her energetic and friendly Sheltie. She led Mary and me toward the back door that opens into a workshop and held the door open for us. She smiled and said hello as Mary re-introduced us, both of us noting that it had been several decades since our last, rare meeting.

Mary and Beverly talked on as we walked the coolers in, and I was almost immediately struck by what I saw as I came through the door. After entering, there is a second set of stairs that you have to descend to get into the main part of the basement, and at the bottom of those stairs sits a rather majestic looking full-sized billiard table. I remember thinking to myself that it seemed a little out of place there amongst everything else I saw, like a Victorian home nestled into the middle of a circa 1960’s erected neighborhood. I even wondered, given its heft and size, how on earth it even came to make its home there, honestly. It had to have taken some work.

But, it was that one incongruity that prompted me to open my eyes a little, I guess, and look a little harder at everything in that space around me. Mary and Beverly were chatting away, talking about the food that Mary wanted to store (which she also offered to share with Beverly as she pleased) and Beverly’s delectables (which she in turn was offering Mary), and while they talked, I took some time to survey everything inhabiting the basement spaces.

There seemed to be forty-some years of family history on every shelf and surface, prompting a multitude of questions I felt more comfortable keeping internal; I thought anything I would ask would be prying, and honestly felt more satisfied with the impressions of stories they offered me.

This basement is not the cluttered storage room of a hoarder, but instead, a room for everyone in the family throughout the years. Everything seems placed out of some sort of necessity, as if it were a new addition that needed some location to permanently reside. When something new was needed and added it has not necessarily meant that something else had to leave, and so the various pieces of family life have come to spatially coexist, accumulating like décor that speaks volumes of memories.

In a recess created by two shelves is a plank door painted white, with a dartboard mounted on it. The hundreds of holes in the surface surrounding the board bear testament to hours spent by kids hurling darts at it. The aforementioned billiard table shows signs of equal use. One section was obviously a father’s workshop area. There are meticulously crafted work benches, built to fit the space and detailed to meet the need of the hobbies he enjoyed. I spotted, on a shelf above one of the workbenches, an incredibly detailed model of a sailing ship, and pictured someone painstakingly working for hours on it.

At some point I think Beverly began to notice my interest in everything, and so we began a leisurely tour of the room. There are numerous artwork pieces everywhere, created by this or that family member. In a corner between the billiard table and the door stand Beverly’s potter’s wheel and kiln, both obviously still very used. A number of Beverly’s pottery pieces—in various stages of completion—sit nearby on a set of shelves.

Beverly is a welcoming person, not someone you feel like scurrying in to see and dashing out from, even if you are there primarily to solve a food spoilage crisis, and so we more or less sauntered our way out of her basement and paused to talk some more in her back yard. Beverly settled into a chair, while Mary made herself comfortable on the sidewalk and I dangled a leg in her pool. The two of them chatted news and food and pets, all mixed in with the occasional story or two about the neighbors who had lived in, or owned, the house next door.

It was while relaxing there and watching Barney run a frenzied pattern around the small paths in the back lawn that I began to notice something else; the pattern exhibited in the basement seemed to be repeated across the exterior of Beverly’s home as well. This is not the symmetrical, predictable, planned-out garden space that one sees in so many lawns. Instead, this landscape seems like it evolved over years of unplanned plantings acquired through gifts, impulse decisions at local nurseries or farmer’s markets, or peer gardener trades. I imagined a friend stopping by with a plant and Beverly commenting on how nice it would look in the corner off the pool, or under the shade tree, or just off the gate that led to the back door. Everywhere you looked, plants just spilled out everywhere, less tamed than they seemed comfortable and thriving.

Beverly makes an impression, and I could easily see why Mary is attracted to her as a friend. She has a sense of humor easy to relate to, and a knack for easy and inviting conversation. In the soothing tone of her voice and the still-present gleam in her eyes, Beverly seems like someone made comfortable and confident by her life experiences, while at the same time offering no hint that she is through living them. Her family raised and her husband passed, I think she has entered a state of grace, learned and earned from both enjoying and overcoming everything that life has thrown her way as a wife, mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother. I couldn’t help but wonder if I may one day earn that kind of space in my life, rich with both memories and history, yet still full of experiences to look forward to.

I couldn’t help but do a mental comparison to Beverly and her home as we were leaving, and it made me a little envious in the process. I am notorious for discarding or selling anything nonessential, and so I have no basement full of memories. My memorabilia is limited to a plastic tub shoved into a storage closet. I also have the habit of needing symmetry in my space; gardens I’ve grown and landscapes I’ve planned and created all had to be just so, designed and planted and maintained with a necessary amount of order. I go nuts when the house is cluttered, can’t even concentrate on work or writing. By comparison, my life seems almost too sterile when I look at what Beverly has built around herself, with the help of her family and friends.

But, I think there’s still plenty of time and hope, in my case. You never know. Maybe one day I’ll have a basement like Beverly’s, one that—someday, far off, when I’m gone—will take the girls hours and days to clean out, because they have to keep pausing to ask each other, “Do you remember…?” as they work. Or at least leave some sort of an impression on someone that visits it.

© 2010 Cody Kilgore. All Rights Reserved worldwide under the Berne Convention. May not be copied or distributed without prior written permission.