You Just Never Know

My basement door is an old, farmhouse door that opens from a small entry porch, which was intended to be the back entrance to the house but is the only one we’ve ever used. The basement (aka cellar) door looks welcoming enough, but you probably don’t want to go there..

Cleaning the basement is one of the items on the list of things to do this winter that I keep shuffling from one pile of papers to another. Here’s another 500-word special, dedicated to the task of sorting through 50 years of things that just might come in handy. Or maybe I’ll leave it to the kids…

You Just Never Know

I turned my attention from the box of tangled telephone cables and peered into another box containing switch covers. Floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with labelled boxes, mocked me: coaxial cables, computer connectors, white plastic water pipe fittings, hose clamps, power bars. 

You just never know, they whispered in a voice that I knew well.

The house where I grew up had a cellar. “Down cellar” in that house was the washing machine, and later a dryer; Dad’s workbench; a coal bin with a conveyor belt that delivered coal to the furnace; a shelf filled with home-canned fruit; and a small, dreary room built specially to house the television, which my parents were compelled to purchase sometime in the late 1950s in order to keep their children from moving in with the neighbours. 

In my own home, we’ve always called it “the basement”. A misnomer. Basements are places with Family Rooms, Furnace Rooms, and Laundry Rooms. They have ceilings that hide the plumbing and wiring. The floors stay dry. You might invite a guest down to play a game of ping-pong or lounge in front of the big-screen TV. 

Mine is a cellar, and only the bravest venture down to this underground warren of stone walls, wires, cobwebs, and concrete floors. A pump in one corner pulls water from the well behind the house into the pipes that snake overhead. Power tools sit on shelves beside shoe-boxes filled with sandpaper scraps. Paint cans pile one on another. A dehumidifier drains water into a sump hole, and a wide plank forms a bridge over the puddle where the floor slopes down to that hole. 

The washing machine and dryer assume pride of place on a square of raised plywood flooring covered with vinyl tiles—a scuffed reminder of a long-forgotten attempt to gentrify. 

And boxes. Shelves of boxes filled with things that Jack kept because—well, you just never know, do you? They might come in handy.

He never cared. I did. So soon after he died, I found myself vacuuming cobwebs from exposed wires, sorting through paint cans, and finding a home for the never-used lathe. Then I turned to the boxes of Things That Might Come in Handy. That’s when things got weird.

Just as I looked away from the switch covers to check out the hose clamps, the pipe connectors started gurgling at me. Then the bungie cords began to squirm, the spare circuit breakers clicked, and replacement Christmas lights winked at the power cords for obsolete computers. When I reached into the box of mouse traps, one bit my finger. Meanwhile, the whisper had become a loud chant: You just never know.

When a set of jumper cables bared its claws and headed my way, I ran for the stairs. The door slammed behind me, but I could still hear them.

And they have a point, don’t they? I mean, they might come in handy.

Okay, I sigh, images of an orderly basement receding. You’re safe with me.