The Day I Cleaned The Basement (Dateline August 2004)

When my husband and I were “expecting” our first child from China several years ago, we didn’t have much of a support group. I didn’t know about adoption groups on Yahoo!. So my husband and I weren’t aware of the effects of “THE WAIT” on previously normal people. Our agency never mentioned it, and as we don’t have any neighbors to speak of, we just came across it blindly one day towards the end of the eight month period BR (before referral). We had been dealing with our last eight kid-free months by carefully marking off the days on the calender. The effects of “The Wait” weren’t noticeable until about the six month mark. A day that will live in infamy. The day I cleaned the basement.

I’m not speaking of a normal basement in a normal house, where most people put their rec room, their spare bathroom and their in-laws. No, I’m talking about a 110 year old Michigan basement. The kind only seen in Michigan, and haunted houses in Virginia (and other places in the deep south). I’m talking about the kind of basement that Stephen King would feature in one of his books, or the type that murder victims would be found in 46 years later by new owners putting up canned tomatoes.

You enter our basement by a hole in the kitchen floor. At one time the hole was covered by a door in the floor that was about 8 feet long by 3 feet wide, operated by a pulley system by what was then the front door. Since then it has been reduced in size to about four feet long and two feet wide, and opened by pulling on a piece of rope that pokes out of the floor. You the put the rope over a hook and hope like hell it doesn’t fall back and hit you on the head as you descend the stairs.

The basement is under the original part of our house, and the walls are made of field stone stacked on top of each other filled with whatever farmers filled their cracks with back then. The floor has been concreted over, but was probably a dirt floor at one time. There is a ladder that leads up to a set of Bilco Doors (picture the basement doors that Dorothy’s Auntie Em had to get into when the tornado came and you get the picture.) The basement ends under the original part of the house and a crawl space (beginning about 3 feet up the back wall) is under the rest of the house (covered in dirt, dead mice and stalactite rocks that hang from the underfloor of the living room). Although I personally haven’t seen any skeletons in this space I’m not discounting old in-laws resting in peace under there...

The basement wasn’t as crowded then as it is now. But there wasn’t any shelving and things were stacked up against the wall. When you opened the door in the floor and hooked the rope back the first thing you saw in the light coming down from the kitchen was a dark shadow escaping back to the crawl space on the other side of the room. I’m still not sure if the shadows moving over to that side of the room were just plays of light and dark, or the spiders, zombies, ghosts and ghoulies returning back to the crawl space under the house..

Now, one doesn’t just march into a Michigan basement, vacumn cleaner hose in hand and start sucking up spiders. One must dress for the occasion. One wears one’s husbands old flight suit (but any one piece jump suit will do). This ensures that the spiders, and other squirmy things, don’t wiggle down the back of your pants into your unmentionable areas. You place your hair in a pony tail and put it up inside your husbands old Marine Corps helmet (to insure no spiders land on your head) and you put on jump boots (with those little elastic things under the pants leg to ensure that your legs are sealed off to the aforementioned spiders). Gloves are optional. Now you are ready to clean.

Armed with just an extension cord, a vacumn cleaner and hose, you bravely wave goodbye to your husband as he shuts the door behind you. You are now alone. Alone with the spider webs (the spiders are smart enough to hide), the dusty furniture, and any ghosts of that might be disturbed by the noise. You turn on the vacumn cleaner and start cleaning. You start with the ceiling first, to ensure that no aerial attacks occur. Next you clean at face level, same reasoning. Then down the walls to the floor. You clean one square foot at a time, ensuring that you leave yourself a wide enough escape path that no spiders can reach you if you have to leave the room at mach 5 because you finally discovered what really happened to dear Aunt Agnes or the “missing cousin” no one talks about.

After about two hours it’s time to switch vacumn cleaner bags. You’re not sure if it’s all the small chips of rock wall filling, dirt, or spiders you have sucked up but the vacumn cleaner isn’t working as well and the vacumn cleaner bag is moving all on it’s own. You scream for your husband to throw down a water bottle, PB&J sandwiches and another vacumn cleaner bag, because you know if you leave the basement unfinished you will never return.

You are now half way through the room and half way to the crawl space, which remains eerily black regardless of how many lights you have turned on. You continue to chase spiders, cleaning out dead pill bugs, large furry exoskeletons of who knows what (and you don’t really want to go there right now, do you?) and strange pieces of confetti that litter the floor. You occasionally wipe a spider web off your face, dust your helmet for things that shouldn’t be there and continue to vacumn at the speed of light (thinking Martha Stewart has nothing on your cleaning skills!)

By the time you are done the place is in apple pie order. For not only have you gotten rid of 2.3 lbs of spider webs, 8.6 lbs of exoskeletons, 14.5 lbs of rock pieces and confetti, but you have also organized everything by size, color and usefulness. You are now just inches from the crawl space. Being the intrepid cleaner you are you slowly put your vacumn cleaner hose to the edge of the space and tentatively start sucking up monster size dust bunnies. Then you stop. What was that? Was it just a light reflected back from the bathroom plumbing or something more sinister?? Not pausing for reflection you slowly back up, clutching the vacumn hose in one hand and the vacumn cleaner in the other. Slowly you turn, step by step, then run like hell to the stairs and out the door (doubting all the way that your feet even touched the ground).

Two weeks later your husband goes down to get the vacumn cleaner you dropped, as the upstairs is now as nasty as the basement was before you cleaned.

Your DH (dear husband) tells you to stand in the yard so he can hose you down. You stand there covered in grey stuff, not really caring that the neighbors are watching you getting sprayed off like a dirty car. You are just trying to ignore the creepy feeling that somehow something with at least eight legs has found it’s way down your back and is heading towards your underwear.

This concluded the cleaning cycle of my “Wait”. Afterwards, to fill my time I obsessively joined adoption groups, tracked FedEx Airplanes and searched for the phone my husband hid because the agency threatened us with legal action if I call “just one more time!”

Mary Who survived the wait five times successfully and is now surviving it “just once more”.