Welcome to the first blog chain of the year! For this round, Jon has challenged us to a writing exercise:
Imagine the home(s) where you grew up, and start drawing a floor plan. As you draw, memories will surface. Grab onto one of those memories and tell us a story.
In lieu of any drawings, I'm going to post a video instead:
No, my house wasn't quite like that. The first house I lived in was a ranch; after that, we moved to two multi-level houses. All of them had basements, which inspired this story based on true events:
Basements
When she was eight, her parents redid the basement. Gone was the play area under the stairs where she drew on the wood with chalk; gone was the grayness and the spooky shower. Instead, her parents put in wood paneling, black-and-white tiles, and a bar. They christened the new area with a huge party.
A few days later, the basement flooded.
Shortly thereafter, they sold that house and moved to one that already had a finished basement. They put the Christmas tree down there, despite the carpet. When she examined the presents, she was already planning which one to rescue in case another flood occurred.
As she grew older, she collected more treasures: books, letters, report cards, trophies, and other memories of her past. One day, she and her husband bought their own house. Into their unfinished basement went all the boxes of memories, to be unpacked someday when they could afford to bring color and softness to gray concrete. They had time to wait; the house inspection had turned up no problems.
They came home one weekend to find the power out and the basement transformed into a wading pool.
The basement is dry now, and clean. But when she goes down there now, she's not even sure which memories had to be discarded like holey rags.
Amparo posted before me, and Matt will post tomorrow. Go check out what stories their childhood memories inspired.
7 comments:
So far, basements have been the most prevalent place I have seen written about.
Yours is very touching. Well done!
Basement flooded twice? That's terrible, even if it wasn't the same basement.
Last year, we had water in our basement three separate times, though luckily only the one really big flood caused any damage. (The other two were caused by leaks in faucets and our water heater.)
Oh our basement flooded when we were kids and tons of our barbie dolls and other toys had to be thrown away. We were devastated.
We lived in a ranch house and didn't have a basement. But we still dealt with flooding now and again. A good story, despite the circumstances.
This makes me so sad! But the part about picking a present to rescue made me giggle a little. :) Man, basements always flood! My parents' house and my husband's parents' house BOTH had flooding problems in the basement. My dad solved his by digging a trench outside. No kidding. What you really need when the basement floods is someone who grew up on a farm to fix it. :) So sorry about your precious memories. All you can do when that happens is make new ones.
Ah basements. Being a Cali girl, I have honestly never lived in a house with a basement. Like ever.
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