I originally published this post one year ago (12/28/2022) on my cohost blog, which I no longer use. The featured image from the original post have been placed throughout the text.
I had a bit of an issue last Saturday morning. After wrapping the gifts I got for my family within the privacy of my closed room, I had leftover gift wrap, tissue paper, and sticker labels that I needed to return to our basement, the place where we kept our miscellaneous holiday resources. With everything in hand I hopped down the stairs to the ground floor, hoping to avoid my mother (a perennial presence in our living areas, especially this time of year), then down a second flight of stairs—and right into our basement.
Our Christmas-related containers call the far corner of the unfinished concrete space their home. Of course, year after year of heaped and forgotten cardboard boxes of books and Bionicles makes this corner relatively hard to access unless you really wanted to, and I really wanted to stuff the tissue stuffing in my hand back where it belonged and continue my day. Hopefully it would be an easy one.
So when I crept a few steps over cluttered cords and camping gear then suddenly found myself experiencing the universally unpleasant phenomena of a wearing a sock while sopping wet, I took a guess that it probably wouldn’t be an easy day.
What I had found was a shallow, standing pool of water that took up most of that corner of the basement. Fortunately it was not flooding, or flowing, or anything like that.
So my father and I got to work clearing out all our belongings from that corner. Although we couldn’t call conclusively where the water had come from… since it wasn’t actively threatening to submerge our subterranean horde of keepsakes, figuring that out was far less pressing than preserving what the water had managed to reach, which… unfortunately… happened to include those cardboard boxes of books.
The water was shallow enough that only the boxes at the bottom of the stacks got wet. Inside them, books were stored in a range of ways. Those placed upright or on their side were certainly salvageable. Others… like many of my father’s old comic books… were laid down flat, and thus completely drenched and basically unsalvageable. If only we had the forethought to place the JK Rowlings at the bottom and not my grandmother’s century-old Charles Dickens collection.
And so my sister and I spent the rest of the day laying out the water-logged works of Frank Miller, Mark Twain, et al upstairs, occasionally blow-drying their edges and bindings. There were some silver linings (and I’m not talking about on the book covers). Picking through our salvage, we found the picture books our parents would read to us when we were little. It was also quite amusing to glance through some of the rather old comics from the ’70s, especially with their advertisements. There was two full pages dedicated to Hubba Bubba’s art of “gumfighting” (seeing who can blow the bigger bubble with gum) and a Sugar Daddy candy ad which claimed a FREE sports game ticket in every wrapper, including tickets for NHL and NBA games. Absolutely absurd to think about today.
My grandmother’s early 20th-century collection of classic authors did indeed survive, along with many mementos of her presence within their pages. She used a few different bookmarks (pictured below), but probably the most unique was a snuffed out cigarette butt flattened by years pressed against the last paragraph of “The Pickwick Papers”. I can imagine her reading “THE END”, spitting out the cig, then slamming the back cover shut. All in all, with what we found, she seemed much more well-read than me (at least on the English and American classics), and again I found myself wishing I got the chance to talk to and appreciate her beyond my childhood.
In the end, we were able to save almost everything that was damaged by the water. It really could have been a lot worse, so I’m thankful that it wasn’t, and instead gave us the opportunity to reflect on our past and a memory for the future.
