March 2005
The basement is an area that has had dramatic meanings for my life. The very word conjures up memories of the fruit cellar, the coal room, the warmth of the furnace, the hiding space under the stairs, and in a dark corner an intriguing and mysterious collection of boxes guarded by cobwebs and a thick layer of coal dust.

My first important basement was under the screened in back porch of the house on College Avenue. A small trap door opened to a set of narrow stairs that led down to a roughly dug out room. There my mother stored the home-canned fruits and vegetables that would sustain us through those meager post depression years when my father was earning $20 a week, and through the desperate early war years when food was so scarce. There, also, I entertained my fantasies of buried treasure fed by overheard and half understood stories of gold coins hidden by the deceased former owner of the house, who was known to have disagreed with President Roosevelt's outlawing of gold ownership.

During that same time I was spending many hours in my maternal grandparent's basement in their home on East Hackberry Street. Every Monday I walked the long block from school to Grandma Newlon's for both dinner and supper, there to find her and my mother doing their week's laundry in the basement with the help of the old Maytag washer. This was an all day activity characterized by the easy camaraderie I sensed between the two women as they pursued washer, wringer,, and clothesline activities.

In warm months, clothes were hung to dry on wire lines outdoors, but during those inclement winter months of my childhood, the clothes hung indoors on rope lines strung over basement beams. Often in the waning afternoons before supper, I chased and terrorized my younger sister through the wet hanging garments to the tired accompaniment of my mother's voice, pleading with me to behave.

On many long winter evenings I sat with my grandfather near the door of the warm coal and wood burning furnace, cracking hickory nuts and hazelnuts on an upright walnut log and attending raptly to his wondrous examinations of the intrigues of world affairs and current events. He was a college educated and extremely well read gentleman, who found me a willing listener to his philosophic ruminations and dramatic poetry recitations. A rural mail carrier by vocation, a carpenter and shoe repairman by avocation, and a quiet practitioner of the Quaker religion every day, he loved to share his hour before supper with his first grandchild. As he sipped his second and third glasses of homemade wine he became more and more expansive toward a high-strung and precocious granddaughter straining fiercely to comprehend and reckon with a world gone suddenly mad.

Years later, a freshmen in college, I at last shared with him a glass of homemade wine in his wine cellar off the main basement as we saddened to the sounds overhead of kindly neighbors and friends viewing the body of Vida Cronan Newlon as she lay in state in the front parlor. He pulled me clumsily to his unrelenting chest and claimed, "My dearest girl, without her it won't be home any more." And, after that, indeed, it never really was.