Mimi’s Corner: Basement Blessings

As I mentioned earlier, we are downsizing and building a new house. There are so many decisions that must be made; some are easy, some are not. One that we made right away was to forego having a basement. We have one now and will miss the storage area.
I have fond memories of the basement in my childhood home. It was great for me and my sister and allowed us and our friends to have a safe and fun place to play when the weather was too wet or cold to play outdoors. The basement was at first one big room, with a fireplace in the middle of it. We had the whole basement to play in. We rode our tricycles and even roller skated around the fireplace. That was the best! The surface of the basement floor was so smooth that it was more like ice skating when compared to the rough, cracked city sidewalks. But it almost killed me.
At the time, we had no clothes dryer and instead, had clotheslines strung under the basement ceiling. One day when I was skating, I reached up and grabbed the clothesline. My skates rolled forward, my weight caused the clothesline to break, and down I went, hitting the back of my head on the concrete floor. I saw stars for a while, let me tell you! It hurt like blue blazes. No blood, but the back of my head grew an impressive lump. My parents kept an eye on me and an ice bag on my head for a while. No concussion, no repercussions, although some people think I’ve been out of my mind since then.
One of the best things was that our grandfather and father built us a chalkboard that hung on the wall. It was the same size as the ones in our grade school, over 8 feet long and 4 feet high, painted green, with a chalk tray at the bottom. We even had the long chamois erasers that our teachers had. We could draw things with colored chalk, play school, play games like “tic tac toe”. The best thing about the chalkboard for me when I was older was using it to solve geometry or trigonometry problems. If I was stuck on a homework assignment, I would go to the big chalkboard and transfer the problem to the board. Most of the time, just the act of reproducing it larger than life, so to speak, revealed the solution to me.
Eventually, my dad built himself a workshop as he was quite the handyman. This is where my sister and I learned to use power tools and helped him build things. Next to the workshop, he built a darkroom and we learned to develop film and print photos. More on that another day. Yes, that big basement was a wonderful gathering place for lots of our friends and I am glad that my kids were able to play in that great basement when they were little.