EPISODE 1 EPISODE 1I lifted the heavy wooden hatch over the narrow staircase leading to the basement. All the houses in our row of 120-year-old base quarters had hatches covering up the basement stairs. Each house in the row was like the other, but our house, Quarters C, had the scariest basement by far.
When the housing manager gave us the initial tour before we moved in, he took us down to the basement, a labyrinth of small spaces partitioned by studs half-covered by tacked-up pieces of drywall, stacked stone, and rickety cabinets from the turn of the century—not the most recent century, either. He was jittery as he led me into each space, flipping light switches as he went.
Strangely, he passed by one door as if it wasn’t there. I stopped, grabbed the doorknob, and said, “What’s this?” as I pushed the door inward. He scurried toward me.
“Oh, well, wait …” he bumbled nervously as I flipped the switch inside the door—and gasped.
A single lightbulb barely illuminated the large space, which I judged was under our living room. The floor was uneven dirt and rubble that rose up on one side toward a huge chunk of bedrock the house had been built over. The monstrous mound of rock was almost as tall as I was. It looked as though two eyes and a mouth might open to reveal Jabba the Hutt. Maybe the builders, unable to get rid of the outcropping of rock, decided to enclose it. Behind a door.
In the corner, a filthy dehumidifier hummed and rattled. The manager forced a shaky grin, advising me to keep that door closed. And so, I did.
But we used the other spaces of our scary basement to store our over-abundant belongings. My family often complains about my propensity to save everything from hospital bracelets to matchbooks, organized and categorized into bins in our basement. It’s true, I’ve always felt compelled to squirrel things away, like my old Holly Hobbie sewing machine, Anna’s and Lilly’s confirmation dresses, Hayden’s sock puppet, and the collar from our long-dead runt of a cat Zuzu.
When Hayden graduated from high school, I sent thirty-six t-shirts I’d been saving in a tub since he was a baby—from Montessori preschool, Taekwando, Boy Scouts, football, band—off to a quilter who made him a one-of-a-kind bedspread to memorialize his childhood. The quilt was such a meaningful graduation gift, I knew my hoarding tendencies were finally justified.
When Anna’s graduation approached, I had to brave the basement labyrinth to find my stash of her t-shirts. With the heavy hatch secured to the wall, I descended the grey-painted stairs to our subterranean, cobwebbed, perpetually damp storage room. Normally, the fear in my gut would compel me to finish my task in the basement quickly and get back to the first floor. But on this day, what should have taken ten minutes took an entire afternoon and a half box of tissues.
The first tub I opened was full of baby items I hadn’t seen in years. I let out a sigh and thought back more than a decade to those sweet moments when Anna was small enough to carry. There, in a musty fluorescent-lit corner, I got lost in memories. I caressed the soft flannel receiving blankets, remembering when she was born in a village hospital in England with an Irish midwife, who insisted I labor in a tub laced with lavender oil as she brought me tea and toast.
Pastel afghans, a tiny gingham dress, and Anna’s baptismal cloth took me further away. The layers in the storage tub were like the rings of a tree. In between were lumps—a special rattle, a tattered pink doll, and a string of brightly-painted wooden beads. My eyes lost focus as I recalled Anna as a sleepy toddler, rhythmically stroking the beads, over and over.
The next box I found was full of old toys. I envisioned the plastic yellow baton, gripped in Anna’s perpetually sticky fingers, relentlessly beating her chunky Fisher-Price xylophone. The purple cloth play purse took me back to our old house in Virginia, where Anna would strut around with the bag over one arm, stopping to apply the fake lipstick and pose precociously before a mirror.
Pink and yellow plates, cups, and pots looked exactly like they did when Anna served up smorgasbords of plastic toy pizza slices, hamburgers, peas, bananas, cupcakes, and cheese wedges. “Mmmm,” I would say, smacking my lips loudly and pretending to chew, eliciting her brightly dimpled smile.
At the bottom of the box, a doll marked by an ink scribble in the middle of her forehead looked serenely relieved to have retired to a cardboard haven. Her life with Anna had not been easy. With the doll slumped in an umbrella stroller, Anna would push her around our cul-de-sac, sometimes hitting a crack that would catapult the poor doll head-first into the pavement. A quick kiss on the scuffed head, and Anna was off again.
A tattered file box contained artwork, crafts, and primitive pottery—ancient relics with cracking macaroni and yellowing glue. Strangely, these gave no indication of Anna’s later talent for art and design. Small spiral notebooks were scribbled with her endless ideas, garment sketches, and redecorating plans. “How to make money this summer: 1. Sell my old Barbies; 2. Make lemonade; 3. …,” on one page. “Rules for Secret Club House,” on another.
It’s an incredible privilege to watch a human being grow, I thought. Cradling a helpless budding newborn in my arms, I couldn’t have imagined the distinctive person who would bloom before my eyes over eighteen years.
I finally found the box of t-shirts, and the wonder of our exceptional daughter came into watery focus. Bossy, stubborn, controlling, and pensive. Intelligent, driven, hilarious, and creative. With big brown eyes, a sparkling smile, and an uncommon dimpled chin.
As I switched out the lights and lugged the box past the door to the lair of Jabba the Hutt, I realized I hadn’t kept all those boxed relics for my children’s sake. I had kept them for my sake, so I could remember. I squirreled items away that would take me back to the moments of motherhood I was afraid I’d forget.
Sniffling up the narrow stairs into the comforting afternoon light of my sunny kitchen, I shrugged off my irrational fear of losing childhood memories. Anna’s high school graduation, like so many moments of her life, would surely be unforgettable. The monumental event would meld her past and present together, imprinting the incredible image of our daughter’s evolution on my mind—forever.