Local couple finds secrets underfoot
Last month we discovered a secret room beneath our house.
We’d been hearing mice in the walls. Then they started appearing in our kitchen, startling us with their quick, fuzzy dartings in the middle of the day. We set a few traps and called in the pros.
Within a few minutes of his examination of our foundation, the pest control guy called us outside. He pointed to something we’d never noticed: a decaying piece of plywood attached to the side of the foundation beneath our entryway, hidden by ferns. We pulled it away and found a hole, surrounded by broken glass and an old window frame. We stuck the handle of a shovel into it as far as it would go, and couldn’t find the bottom.
Over the next couple of days, Q dug away at the dirt and pulled out shards of broken glass. We stuck a flashlight in the opening and discovered a room, roughly 7’ by 10’, sealed off entirely from the basement. There was some old HVAC ductwork, random tangles of string and old wiring, and a rusty shelf holding three ancient looking typewriters.
I lowered myself in enough to grab the typewriters and haul them up and out. We kicked over the shelf and discovered more typewriters stacked beneath it, too far down for me to reach.
The local news came out and did a story on the room before we sealed it up, and a few days later a woman got in touch. She was the niece of the former owners, the cousin of the woman who sold me the house in 2011. She had seen the story on the news, heard us questioning the mystery of the room, and wanted to reach out.
The former owners, Ken and Marge, had been eccentric, she said. Hoarders. Ken was a machinist for General Mills for years, and loved collecting old, broken machines to squirrel away and tinker with. Marge had worked for Dayton’s downtown department store for decades, until she started suffering from dementia.
Their daughter Carolyn — the one who sold me the house — had moved to California as soon as she was old enough, and rarely returned to visit ever again. Their son Paul suffered from schizophrenia. He was removed from the house as a teenager in the 1960s, and became a ward of the state until his death in 2006.
The niece couldn’t shed any light on why the room had been sealed off from the basement and hidden away. And I couldn’t ask Carolyn, because she was in a nursing home now in California, suffering from the same dementia that her mother had had.
Before we sealed the room back up (this time properly, with concrete block and mortar), we dropped in an old Apple TV we had just replaced, along with a handwritten note. “Hello to whoever finds this room next,” I wrote. “The year is 2020. There’s a global pandemic. Trump is president, and many people are afraid. This house is full of love. We removed three typewriters from this room, and dropped in some more recent technology to replace them.”
A couple weeks later, we were moving some electrical wiring in the kitchen that required me to shimmy up into the crawl space above our back porch. I hoisted myself up there and found reams and reams of old paper. I dropped several down and opened them: all blank. Yellowed, curling at the edges — hundreds and hundreds of empty pages and blank notepads bearing the logo of a long-defunct print shop in Minneapolis.
I left most of them up there. We finished the wiring project and closed the crawl space back up. And we went on with our lives, the ghostly typewriters sealed away beneath us, blank pages hovering overhead, the dailiness of our story unfolding in the space between.
It’s not often we get a chance to stop our ceaseless motion and dig down where we’re standing, explore the hidden shape and history of the foundation underlying our lives. To excavate the past, release a whoosh of echoes, plant some new intentions in their place. To remember that the past didn’t go anywhere; it’s below us and above. We walk on ancient rock. Our nights are illuminated by the light of dead stars.
Time is a circle, or a spiral, or a sandwich. This moment is the filling. And it's fuller than we know.
Morsels and Tidbits
Speaking of buried history, one of the world's biggest concentrations of ancient mammoth skeletons has been discovered beneath the construction site of a new airport in Mexico City.
Loved this essay in The Correspondent on how the pandemic is an intervention, inviting us to build a world that prizes wellbeing over profit.
This was one of my favorite pieces to research and report so far this year — the reading and interviews I did totally upended a lot of what I thought I knew about the relationship between health and body size.
I got to answer a few questions for Fast Horse on writing, acting, and the current theater drought.
And finally, I'm really enjoying Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time, a new book of essays that layers climate science, mythology, nature writing, and memoir, and in the process transports to me some of my favorite landscapes in the country.
I hope you're finding moments of peace and beauty as we turn the corner toward autumn. It's such a strange, potent mix of tumult and stillness these days, with the news moving a mile a minute even as our daily lives become more stationary. I guess sometimes structural changes require us to stop, sit still, and reexamine the shape of the reality we thought we knew.
The crown of the tree outside the window by my desk is turning gold and red, and I feel like I've made friends with the bluejay who perches daily on the branch at eye level. I don't know that I've ever spent so many days sitting in one spot, watching the seasons unfurl and contract. (And burning the occasional sage to keep the house's spirits soothed.)
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Wishing you nourishment, connection, and soul-deep pleasure,