A machete, a chainsaw, a potter’s wheel, jumper cables, and an actual stack of Bibles: Anyone who saw what was sitting on my writer’s desk right now would either diagnose paranoia or predict my imminent flight “off the grid.” But the avocado-green Dutch oven, the cobalt-blue stemmed-glass dessert bowls from 1960s Czechoslovakia, and the mid-20th-century Electrolux vacuum cleaner . . . these give a more accurate picture of what’s going on. All that stuff used to be in our cellar. And we no longer have a cellar.
The houses in our neighborhood were built in the 1920s. That’s a while ago. Many now need work. For a lot of our neighbors, this is the whole point of living around here. People in this area have done so well out of the last couple of decades that the houses they bought at the start of the Clinton administration are no longer quite grand enough for them. Families are always either “bumping out” their houses or talking about it. This usually means converting as much yard into house as zoning laws will permit. The smaller the family, the more megalomaniacal the project. The Joneses need a new mud room for when their half-dozen boys come home from baseball. The bachelor lobbyist who lives next-door to them needs to replace his toolshed with the Taj Mahal. Who, after all, would ever need a toolshed?
Our own house makes a strong argument for expansion, to put it politely, but our yard does not. You can get a sense of the scale of our landholdings this way. This is a neighborhood with a lot of dogs and pooper-scooper laws that are strictly enforced. There is no corner of our lawn so remote from the sidewalk that a dropped turd would require the dog-owner actually to step off the sidewalk to pick it up.
“Our house,” I used to joke, “has nowhere to go unless it falls over.” Last summer I tried this one out on an engineer who had come to fix our sagging porch. He didn’t receive it in the expected spirit of hilarity. Instead he said, “Funny you should mention that.” So we are now shoring up some walls on which the porch used to rest. That meant relaying the driveway. Which didn’t make sense to do unless we fixed the garage and basement, which in our house amount to the same thing. That is why the bicycles and fishing rods are in the dining room and the power mower is standing next to the upstairs toilet.
Our contractor asked us to think about what we wanted out of our new basement. Use your imagination! Are you thinking about a ping-pong table? A place for reading? Perhaps even a Jacuzzi, with a wet bar over in the corner. All well and good, I say, but what about my bait cooler? It can’t stay on the living room couch forever. Having been in the house 20 years, I find it hard to think of our basement as the site of a Jacuzzi, anyway. I tend to think of it more as the kind of place you bury the feller you kilt with a shovel when y’all had too much licker and he done said sump’m bout yer Maw.
I remember fondly the only renovation we ever did in the house where I grew up. Once I left for college and it became safe to have nice things, my mother hatched a scheme to redecorate the whole house. Actually she hatched several of them. Too bad for her. After having had all the wallpaper stripped, the carpets pulled up, and the upholstery cut off, she settled down to make her design decisions, a process that only took eight or nine years. My college friends got the impression my parents were the roughest kind of bohemians or that I had grown up in one of those Samuel Beckett plays in which all the action takes place in a cardboard box.
When my mother’s project was finally done, though, it was pretty extraordinary. Ahead of its time, even. It hinted at the more ambitious acts of snazzing up that our neighbors have been carrying out over the last decade or two. For most people, redecorating means rewarding oneself for years of striving by building a monument to one’s own success and good taste.
In our house, however, we continue to march to a different drummer. Our approach has been to take a year’s earnings and bury them in the cellar.
