With a turn of the faded gold handle, a pitch black space would greet me, filled with nothing but dark outlines of indistinguishable shapes. A single light switch installed upside down on the beam closest to the door was always the first thing I reached for before even stepping onto the first cement step becuase I did not like being in the basement in the dark. We tied a red yarn to that lightswitch so we could turn it on and off from other places in the basement, and for years, I yanked on the yarn before anything else, because it served to quicken the process of bringing light to under the house.
The room was no more than four feet tall. Wooden beams running parallel across the roof of the basement were actually the floor of the kitchen above. Nails jutted down at random places on the makeshift ceiling, threatening to scalp us without warning. The floor was lumpy and uneven, covered in brown shag carpet and almost never visible. Too many toys. Everywhere. Card games. Dress-up clothes. Clue. Stuffed animals. Barbies, barbies and more barbies.
The basement smelled like dead mice, wet sand and unvarnished wood. Rust lingered on all of the pipes lining the ceiling, and the only thing more numerous than the boxes forming random walls all around the 20 foot crawl space was the cobwebs hanging in every corner. There were spiders--not just daddy long legs either--and mice. There was dust and dirt. There were only two light bulbs, and only 60 watts at that. There was a corner heaped high with random inherited clothes and a shadowy half for storage--we weren't allowed over there. (But who hasn't built a secret fort where they aren't allowed? Ours lasted all the way until mom disovered it ((and the forgotten saltine crackers)) years later). While sitting in the basement, the pounds of footsteps from people in the kitchen created an eerie feeling of impending doom, and the scratches of the dog's nails up above were reminiscent of nails on a chalkboard. It was a creepy place.
But we spent hours down there.
Tucked somewhere between Dad's box of old English notes and Grandma Halcyon's trunk, nestled next to a broken shelf and sidled between the old mattresses and the Christmas decorations was a sprawling kingdom of barbies.
So many barbies. Sum and I would spend days huddled amongst our miniature world, one which she had constructed with careful precision and crafty eye. The junk Mom discarded became the precious keepsakes of Summer's barbie world; a scap of cardboard covered in black construction paper to become a chalkboard; the fallen petals of an artificial bouquet neatly arranged in a vase molded from blue tack for home decor; the broken spring of a click pen turned into the tiny slinky of the youngest barbie. She would play, and I would do the hair. I would make the clothes, and sometimes, I would jump into the world my sister considered a real part of her own.
With every first day of school, new puppy, and first date of the barbies, the scent of the dead mice faded. There seemed to be no more cobwebs when we planned a family vacation or made dinner. The wooden beams served as platforms where the bad guys held the barbies ransom on our adventurous days, and the uneven ground was the world's greatest roller blade park.
No one would ever know, without turning that faded gold and pulling that red yarn, the magical world beneath that old 60 watter.
Good!
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