Detritus, Literal and Figurative
A sudden subterranean aquatic event has caused us to empty out our basement, thwarting our malign intentions of having our son do it after we croak. We awoke Tuesday morning to the event in progress, and today (Wednesday) a salvage crew from a firm referred by our insurance company arrived to inventory damages and take stuff offsite to be cleaned and returned to us, if salvageable.
We’ve lived in the house since New Year’s Eve of 1974, so you can probably see where this is going. We substantially remodeled in 1981, and stored the house’s then-contents, of course, in the basement. In retrospect, it’s amazing how much stuff just never made it upstairs again.
I practice my trumpet down there, and have been subliminally aware that the space required to erect my music stand and assume a position at a distance befitting my age-appropriate focal length was becoming problematic. It was easy to espy a couple boxes and assume (unfairly, as it turned out) that it was due to our son’s appetite for parental self-storage, and feel momentarily absolved.
The salvage crew arrived shortly after 8am, and we were stunned to learn that the entire basement needed to be cleared out in order to observe their protocols. So began a process of speed-dating with 43 years of my past, wherein we had split-seconds to make keep-or-toss choices as the patient, but certainly judging, young folks held trash bags waiting for our binary decisions. If we had engaged this task ourselves, we would certainly have spent days or weeks agonizing over every talisman, but with dollars instead of sand pouring relentlessly through the hourglass, we had the place empty in just about 6 hours.
It was really like watching a twitchy fast-forward home movie of our lives. An artifact would surface, and an associated memory would flash in my brain, but just as suddenly it would go blank, as there was no time to linger.
I reflect back on the day with an odd sort of sense of accomplishment, which tends to overshadow the gut-wrenching trauma of awakening on Tuesday. What will keep me awake tonight? Wondering if we saved Skeletor’s Castle. I remember seeing it behind something, but I was not the final arbiter.
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We did manage to save Mr. Bunny, the constant companion of our young son. Mr. Bunny is a survivor of decades, including an emergency FedEx trip from Ohio to Seattle over a grueling 48 hours of absence.
