Basement Blues

I’ve been working fairly consistently in my basement to clean and rid it of accumulated items from the past twenty years or so. Things that weren’t worn enough to toss have now been tossed. Things that haven’t been used, tossed. Things that have been stored for others, I gave options and some of those got tossed. There were plastic shopping bags of newspapers. I imagine nearly twenty in all and most of them were incinerated.

I burned a coffee table and two end tables that had become scarred and wobbly. Some small scraps of wood joined the pile and helped to bring on the global warming that scientists have lied about. An old plastic cooler minus its lid sent a smoke signal to be saved, so I tossed on two foam rubber pillows from an old couch, but to no avail. They ascended into the heavens on dark billows.

Old pieces of warped plywood became part of the funeral pyre, as did some magazines, a few rags, and other odds and ends. My daughter, Anna and her boyfriend, James, said that they got a call from NASA saying they could see my signal. It was bright that evening they commented, but I thought it was more like the rubbish heap outside of Jerusalem, called Gehenna; the place of eternal fire.

I certainly made a blaze that I fed over several days as I uncovered more and more things that had lost their usefulness.

The reason for the sudden urge to rid the basement of some of the unnecessary things, and believe me there is still a lot left, is that my basement has always been a wet basement. A slow trickle of water slides across one side of the basement. I decided that I wanted to dry it out and have a usable basement.

I hired a well known company to come in on a contingency plan. If an opening came up, they would give me a week’s notice to get everything away from the walls, so the workers can open a channel on the inside floor to arrange all seepage into a sump area and be pumped outside. The men would need a workspace of three to four feet of room to maneuver. It is basically done, except for some home canned goods in the cold cellar. It has been a strain on my old body, but I have the space opened and I am waiting for the call.

The only problem is, I won’t know where to look for any of my tools or other things. I even filled my “chicken coop” looking shed with hand tools; hoes, rakes, and spades. I managed to put some old windows, two old bikes, and some wood I wanted to keep.