An unfinished basement

   The house I grew up in was built in the 1860s or thereabouts.  So my parents told us, and so we were happy to believe.  It meant we could say our house was built during the Civil War.  It made it seem historic, and not just old.  

   But old it was, as we were reminded by door frames that weren't close to being square to the ceiling.  Or anytime we went down into the cellar, with its packed dirt floor and stone foundation walls.  The foundation must have been dug by hand, something I never thought about in the fifteen years that I lived there, or the couple of summers I came back before I didn't.  Like a lot of things, it just didn't occur to me at the time.

   The cellar smelled faintly of earth and stones, because that's what it was made of.  And, because of my father, it smelled like metal and paint and chemicals for cleaning paint and the electric motor of the grinding wheel on the work bench and the cold sparks that flew from it when my father was sharpening the blade of the lawn mower or some tool that would just work a lot better if you took a few minutes out to sharpen it.  

   The dirt floor had a think covering of gravel that my father put down, a bucket at a time.  It made a crunching, scuffling sound as you walked around, your head stooped a bit from the low ceiling, to fetch something you had been sent for or to hold something down that needed to be steadied while it was cut or drilled or nailed or screwed or glued.

   In the back, behind the rows of shelves that held all the paints and stains, was a potato crib, made of boards and old shutters, that my father made to hold the potatoes that he grew in the big garden at the bottom of the back yard.  And behind that was the bulkhead with its short set of wooden stairs that led up to the same back yard.

   This was the bulkhead that the skunk walked up.  The skunk that fell into the cellar after he knocked in one of the little windows along the top of the foundation.  The skunk my father found in the basement when he went down one evening to do something or other, before beating a hasty retreat.  This was a problem.  He thought about various ways to catch the skunk and get it out of the basement.  But all manners of catching skunks involve the obvious risk of getting sprayed.

   And then I offered up the notion that if we just opened the bulkhead and waited for a while, the skunk might be able to walk up the stairs and just take himself out.  I think my father was the one who quickly yanked the bulkhead door open from the outside, before we all peered out the window, straining through the gloom, to see if the skunk walked out.  Which soon enough it did.  A big one, too.

   I remember this not so much because of the skunk, but because it was the first time I ever figured out something my dad didn't.  I didn't care for it then.  Nor now.