~Everything Through Him~: February 2010

My Favorite Place

Many people have that favorite place that they love revisiting over and over again. Possibly because of the weather, or maybe they enjoy the people that are always present there. You could have shared your favorite memory in that place too. Whatever it is, something about this location brings a smile to your face whenever you mention its name. You savor every single detail about it. When you picture it in your mind, you could name the smells, sounds, colors, etc. My favorite place happens to be a spot where I spent a majority of my childhood, a place where my happiest memories had been made. My favorite place is the basement in my first Indiana house.

When you opened the tall wooden door at the end of our kitchen, you experience this blast of air that smelled of new plastic and old cement. The temperature immediately dropped about ten degrees, and you were in heaven. You would walk down the unproportioned wooden stairs, smoothed to a soft finish from years of usage, and see a cold cement wall to your right. If you put your hand on it, it had a smooth yet rough texture to it. You looked right in front of you, you see more cement wall. But if you turned your head just a little to the left, the pit of your stomach fills with excitement and you don’t know why you weren’t already down those creaky stairs. You jump the final step, and land on the icy cold cement floor. You take two more steps and you are now on colorful variety of carpets, almost always covered with crayons, beads, Barbie’s, race cars, Thomas trains, stuffed animals, and other miscellaneous junk. The perfect kid’s play area.

Under the stairs there are tons of big blue boxes that hold every other toy that isn’t already conveniently left out for your usage. Right next to the boxes are the laundry machines. Kids with sensible minds don’t wander over there, nothing special but dirty clothes and detergent. You run out into the large room with only one small window, at least ten feet above you. At the back right corner you see a giant Mickey Mouse house complete with crayon graffiti. At the back left corner you see my personal favorite spot. In a little cut off section about ten feet by ten feet you are pleasantly surprised to see a collection of sixteen hospital mattresses that my dad brought home from work. You could throw yourself in any direction, and still land safely in the heap of mats. Yes, the basement is my favorite place. But it isn’t what was in it, it was the memories that I made with my older and younger brother that set this place in front of everywhere else.

I can remember the good old days when it was just my older brother Billy and I. We’d recreate Noah’s ark with the little ark that my grandfather made for me. We’d play with his trains too. The one memory that I really remember is when my brother decided we were going to play haircut. He chopped almost all the hair off one side of my head. What makes this memory really funny to me is that at the time, I really couldn’t care less. My mom was angry though, and once I realized that my new style might be a bad thing, I got mad at my brother too. After that my younger brother Ben became old enough to join in our fun, and that’s when things got interesting. We were three amigos that were always caught red handed. Our mischievous incidents weren’t meant to cause harm or damage. No, we were just trying to figure out how to have fun in a small town where the most exciting thing was the cows just down the street. Our parents saw our innocence and forgave us, even though we cost them a lot of money in repairs. At first we’d spend our long summers, weekends, and snow days playing with Billy’s Hot Wheel collection. We named our cars and played around with them like they were people. In fact, we probably invented the script of the hit Pixar movie Cars. We would take out everything possible to make racecar tracks too. See, innocent fun right?

Wrong. Because when it got time to cleaning up our mess, we had our own secret way of handling things. I normally wouldn’t share this with the world because this is strictly between my brothers and me, but since our basement days are sadly over, I may as well spill. When our parents locked us in the basement and told us no dinner until it was clean, one by one we’d start planning our escape. We knew our mother very well for our young ages. We knew that she cared so very much about each and every one of us. We knew that she hated it when one person hurt the other. So what did we do? We started trying to get hurt. One person would annoy the other until that person finally gave in and slapped the other and that would be enough for us to produce tears. We’d go screaming up to my mom, and she’d let us eat and make the others finish cleaning the mess. Poor Billy was always the last one down there to finish the job, because he thought at the age of six, he was too “grown up” to go crying to mommy.

Another time it was New Years Eve and we were so happy that is was finally 2000. Billy was eight, I was six, and Ben was four. We decided it would be a great idea to throw a 2000 party. So we went to the basement with markers and crayons and wrote 2000 on all the furniture, walls, and toys. We were stoked to show our parents. They weren’t too enthusiastic about it though. We spent that night scrubbing down everything and getting a long, painful, lecture.

Our last big memory that we shared was a while later when a motel was being built right next to our house. We saw tons of dirt and rocks being pulled out of the ground, where the foundation would be. I think it was Ben who said. “Guys! Let’s make a rock museum!” A rock museum? Wow, fun! So we asked our mom if we could take a couple rocks from the lot next door and put them in our basement. She agreed if we washed all the dirt off of them first. So, when the first bucket of clean rocks came down we set them on our desks. We loved it so much that we went to go get more. We agreed that washing the rocks off just wasn’t going to fit into our schedule. So we skipped that step, bringing down more buckets of dirty rocks. After all the rocks were in place, we made another trip to the lot to grab a couple buckets of dirt to add to the effect of the whole thing. What was a real rock museum where the rocks didn’t appear to be in their true environment?

When we finished our little fun we wanted to show our parents, but we needed to vacuum up the dirt before they got mad. Bad idea. The dirt turned to dust through the vacuum machine and the air was soon filled with it. Forget a rock museum; it looked like we were experiencing a sand storm. We knew our little innocent fun had gotten out of hand and we needed an adult to help us now. When we came upstairs and called our parent’s. We were prepared for the beatings to begin. But, to our surprise they started laughing. Apparently the dust had gotten all over us too and we were brown all over. All you could see were three little bodies and six eyes, staring up with confusion. I don’t quite remember the clean up process, but it must have been good because we sold our house shortly after that.

That was the end of the basement. A junky spot my parent’s stuck us where we’d gotten on their nerves, but a place with a thousand good memories to me.

Hoped you enjoyed it!!
~emily~