Sentimental Memories

I have not ventured down to my Pop-Pop’s basement for several years, but when I was much younger I spent nearly every afternoon there, during the hours between the end of my elementary school day and my mother’s work day. It might seem strange for me to have spent so much time in a cold, damp, cement room, with chipping paint and dusty old furniture waiting to be refinished. But I assure you, it was a place of comfort rather than creepiness. It is where I built birdhouses with Pop-Pop, then painted them with Nana. It is where Pop-Pop taught me how to draw the horses that he had spent so much time with when he was a jockey. It is where Nana let me play with all the colored chalk I could get my hands on, as long as I didn’t wipe my hands on her dress.

Pop-Pop’s workbench was his territory, cluttered with hammers, nails and pencils in the corner under the rickety wooden stairs that even today still need fixing; and Nana’s was the adjacent rusty wash basin and drying rack where she carefully washed and mended their clothes, and once upon a time their children’s and even mine. When Pop-Pop and Nana kept getting older and the stairs seemingly got steeper, we went down to the basement less and less frequently. When Nana died, I stopped going down there altogether. But I still remember the cluttered coziness of that room, as well as the scary first step you had to take before you could reach the hanging light bulb at the top of the stairs in order to go any further. And I miss it.