Article by Thomas Nielsen Art by Jane Keenan
Sometimes, especially around holidays, I think about my grandparents' old house and their unfinished basement with the harsh yellow light and its cord you had to pull. To my grandparents, the basement was a storage space, a place to put old clothes, boxes filled with knick-knacks my grandma didn’t want to get rid of, and furniture. To my cousins and me, it was our playroom.
It had a dusty, slightly wet smell. It was large and completely open, except for the water heater and pipes, in a large concrete-floored room. It was always cold enough to elicit the occasional shiver, even in summer.
We would push around plastic cars, kicking our feet underneath, stopping at the stairs to go through our own constructed “drive-thru” to spend our paper money for plastic food. The game continued long after we were too big to fit inside the cars — instead, we would lie on top of the yellow dome, pushing off the ground for a boost. The money often became a point of contention. One of my cousins would always be the “banker”, distributing money for jobs done. He’s a business major now. He would usually stiff his younger brother, which started a few screaming matches that my sister and I mostly stayed out of.
Somehow, it took me until the year before that house was sold to realize that I was experiencing my father’s childhood home. I always knew it was, but I didn’t make the connection to him growing up there, being young in that same place. I remember seeing his bedroom through new eyes, the carpeted floor, the wooden plane, and the photos on his shelves. Pieces of his past.
That was something we shared, growing up in that home. It must have been funny for him to be sleeping in his childhood bedroom past the age of 40, visiting a home that was mostly the same for years and years.
Mostly what I miss about that home is the feeling: of laughing up late with my cousins until my aunt came to yell at us, of waking up early to watch Tom and Jerry with my uncle as he got on his laptop to do work, of sunlight coming through the window and illuminating the pastel colors of the couch. When I think of it, I see flashes of dew, the smell of dust, sitting on air mattresses, and reading old books.
When my grandparents sold that house, it was one of those first explosive moments that showed me I was growing up, that I was leaving childhood. In my head, it was a rock, present for as long as I could remember. At that point, I didn’t have a lot left like that. I had moved houses, moved schools, and was myself experiencing the growing pains of adolescence.
It was the first year I was a teenager. They moved into a smaller condo. They didn’t need the space anymore. Neither did the rest of the family. We started seeing our cousins less and less.
Sometimes I feel old, but I’m not. I’m long gone from those days of childhood, though, and I’ll go weeks without thinking and feeling like the kid I used to be. But sometimes, a certain smell of dust, must, cardboard and concrete will hit my nose, going straight to my brain, and I am seven again, on top of a plastic car. In thirty minutes, my dad will yell down to tell us to come up and set the table. After dinner, I’ll watch the football game with my grandpa. I don’t really have much else to worry about.
All of my family is still East. I miss when four hours felt like a long way to travel to see family. And I miss staying somewhere that felt older than me. Family isn’t a place anymore.