Sorry, Thoreau, I too busy...

"Ugh, my summer is so full already." I complain, sitting at mom's table. It is the beginning of July, and I'm researching methods for teaching vocabulary for a summer committee I am on.

"How can it be full already? It hasn't happened yet!"

I know what she's getting at but, "It doesn't matter. It is. I have, like, 20 days out of the whole summer that I'm going to be home. And those days are already full."

"They're not full. They haven't happened yet."

This is a maddening response when you look at your calendar and rows of days are blocked off, week after week. Sure they're filled with people you love and things you like - things you planned yourself, things you look forward to. But when you look at in in black and white, on paper, it is suffocating.

"You can't live in the future, Maegan." She cracks open a cold Brisk Iced-Tea and sets it next to the stack of books on the table. "Life happens in moments. The past is past, and the future isn't here yet. All you have is this moment, right now."

"And I'm spending it working on STUPID VOCABULARY!" I huff. This could have been me at twelve-years old. At two years old. Mom says my first complete sentence was, "I too busy." I'm not missing the point...just not accepting it. She is right of course...it is as the Transcendentalists and earthy-crunchy-yoga-guru-self-help-book-authors say: "Only that day dawns to which we are truly awake." (Thoreau) Life happens in moments.

Flash forward a few weeks. Our camera breaks right before vacation. The first summer vacation with the baby. It's a disaster. All those fleeting Kodak moments slipping through my fingers! No pictures with the baby cousins! No "Evan in his first swimming pool." And then...

Instead of watching Evan's first family reunion on a tiny 2x3 digital screen and clicking at the opportune moment...

We wake up early in the morning and and play peek-a-boo on the bed while the fan blows the last lingering wisps of cool night air across our backs.

I stand in the pool and toss him in the air to watch him squeal with delight one more time as he splashes into my arms in the water.

We stalk around the side of the house, him just out of my reach..."I'm gonna get you!"

We laugh in the cool relief of the air conditioned back seat because he realizes, even buckled in, he can get his big toe in his mouth.

I crack up as he licks all the salt off my hand at the beach.

We share an ice-cold glass of pineapple juice with two straws, the tall ships of Salem bobbing in the background.

He rides in the backpack carrier, and I hold his tiny bare feet in my hands till he falls asleep, breathing softly behind my ear.

"We are always getting ready to live but never living," Emerson whispers, as I lay back on the lawn chair and click on my Kindle. I will myself to enjoy the moment. To not make a mental list of all the things I still want to do before we go back. To not think about how vacation will be over in two days. How everyone will pack up and drive home into those inked in boxes on the calendar. Life happens in moments. I banish the future to...the future. And it works.

When we get home, we order a new camera battery. Don't judge. You'd order a new battery, too. But I'm trying to look at my calendar differently. Even if the days look full, the moments are not. They haven't happened yet. When they do, I'll try to be ready for them. I'll try not to steal any more moments from myself by pinning them to the future. I'll let them slide through my fingers. I'll feel them, smooth like a ribbon, rough like a twined rope, the textures of life. And I won't grasp.

I'll try not to, anyway.

Sunblock and Spring Cleaning

Two weeks into July and we finally got around to spring cleaning. Tuesday was hot and humid - a perfect day for dragging things outside to wash. While Nate watched the baby, I balled up the grimy shower curtain, grabbed an old pot that I use occasionally for sterilizing diapers, and gathered a bunch of rags. I dumped them all in the grass in the back yard. Then I slathered the baby with sunblock while Nate dragged out the junglegym our neighbors handed down to us.

Sunblock is one of the things that I truly hate. I mean, I despise it. What makes it worse is I am a freckly-sunburny-got-Irish-in-me-white-girl. So I have to wear sunblock. And it drives me nuts.

It sticks to everything. It's oily and it makes your skin feel dirty all day long. If you have to use the really high SPF stuff like I do, it is literally like opening a bottle of Elmer's glue and trying to rub it all over yourself. It leaves gross, slimy fingerprints on everything you touch. (Although, once Evan left little sunblock fingerprints on my glasses, which blocked the U.V. rays on my Transitions lenses, so I had cute little un-sunglass fingerprints in front of my eyes...).

Sunblock makes it hard to turn a doorknob. And if your clothing moves just a fraction of an inch, you get this tiny sliver of a sunburn on the unprotected skin between the sunblock and your shirt. I would certainly rebel if I could...but then I remember that fateful summer.

I was at my friend's house in elementary school and we were going to go to a parade. Being a good little girl, I made sure to ask for some sun-tan-lotion. In my house, that always meant sunblock. What else would coat yourself with before heading out into the inhospitable UV rays? I fried like a piece of chicken.

It is the memory of those blisters that will keep me from foregoing the sunblock ever again. The same for my baby. So I slathered Evan with sunblock and covered him with a hat (which he kept taking off).

We met Nate in the yard and proceeded to soap down the pot, the shower curtain and the disassembled play set (effectively washing off a lot of the sunblock...) Meanwhile, Evan played with hose (supervised, of course). The water was freezing and he LOVED it. We left the rags to dry on the grass in the sun while we put the slide back together and tried it out with Evan.

Once he got over screaming that we took the hose away, he got really into the play set. We parked it under the big red maple in our yard to keep him out of the sun. As he climbed around the little windows and doors under the slide, the dirt and leaves from under the tree stuck to the sunblock on his arms and legs. It was like rolling a little vanilla soft-serve cone in sprinkles. Sorry, Evan. Get used to it!

Eggs in a Nest Part 2: Call it like it is.

Don't hate me...I think the English language is awesome. That's right, I said it. Other countries have committees to keep words out of their lexicon. We add words like, "D'oh" to our dictionaries. We have duplicate, triplicate, even quadruplicate words for things, including animals and food.

This can tell you something really interesting about our culture. Our words keep our food sources separate from the prepared, packaged food we buy in the grocery store. For example: You raise a cow on a farm. You eat beef. You raise pigs, you eat pork. You might drive by a nice pasture of fluffy sheep. You don't eat sheep...you eat mutton.

You can actually trace the origins of this back to the Norman invasion of England. When the wealthy French came and took over, they referred to their food (which was served to them already cooked) using French terms (boeuf, moutton, porc). The English peasants who actually raised the animals used the Old or Middle-English names to refer to their livestock.

We retain that separation of language today, and with it a weird tendancy to want to separate the food on our plate from the source. I beleive this goes beyond guilt about eating a cute little sheep. Somehow, we are disgusted by the dirtyness of eating. After all, it is killing another living thing to eat it. It puts us on the food chain. It makes us an animal.

I know how lucky I am to have grown up knowing exactly where my food comes from. One of my earliest vacation memories was a trip our family took to visit my father's friend on a dairy farm in upstate New York. We stayed in an (extra?) farm house, and ate our cereal with a pitcher of fresh milk on the table.

That week, we explored pastures, rode horses, and took a tour of the dairy barn. Other than my favorite pants being splattered with cow poop, it was a pretty ideal vacation for a little kid. In the back of my mind, I still harbor the fantasy of leaving it all behind, and going to live on a farm like that...until I remember that we were vacationing on a farm, not working on it.

It is a lot of work to take care of animals. We found this out when we raised chickens for 4-H. We had big, white Leghorns. They got so fat that you could see the skin between their feathers. And they were scary. I think they are evidence that dinosaurs didn't go extinct...they evolved into broiler chickens that peck at your legs when you get too close. We used to have to wear my dad's huge rubber boots when we fed them.

It was kind of a relief when it was time to off them. My mom got the dirty job. Those chickens had no idea what was coming. A loop of rope, a stump and a hatchet...we saw, literally, what it meant to run around like a chicken with its head cut off. But that year we ate chicken...not a clean little slab of shrink-wrapped boneless, skinless, white meat.

By the way, chicken is one of the words we use interchangeably for livestock and food. In fact, if you raise chickens, you might even call the young ones pullets - which comes from the French - poulet. Another example of the beauty of the English Language - no consistency whatsoever.

Later we got laying hens. They were beatiful Rhode Island Reds, with dark maroon iridescent feathers. In the morning we'd walk barefoot through the wet grass to the chicken coop (they were much gentler than the Leghorns). There were two sides to the coop, the goat side, and the chicken side. You let the goats out, and then unhooked the little, wooden door to get at the hens' boxes. They were lined with hay, and there were always warm eggs waiting for you in the morning.

All year long we made egg salad and scrambled eggs and eggnog. We gave them away to anyone who would take them (who knew how valuable those free range eggs were back then?). If the eggs went bad, we stood on the corner of the deck and used them for target practice, aiming for the tallest, straightest tree in the woods.

Sounds idealic, right? And then I remember cleaning the chicken coop. Ugh. It was so gross. The hay, woodchips, and chicken poop condensed on the floor into this wierd composite, almost like plywood. You had to chip it up with a shovel. The smell was awful. But it was all part of our food chain. We ate the eggs that came from that coop, so we had a stake in keeping it clean. (I'm spouting off about the interconnectednes of food now, but at the time I didn't think about it. I just hated cleaning the chicken coop.)

We never successfully had a vegetable garden. There was the random squash plant that showed up in my mom's flower garden. We lived in the woods in the middle of nowhere. It was a place where the tomatoes never ripened because of all the shade.

But we did raise pigs. We named them Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner. Dad built a pig-pen on the hill in the back yard. We filled their water trough, poured their feed, and zapped ourselves on the electric fence. In the summer the smell could drive you out of town, but in the winter, our freezer was stocked with hams and bacon. Dad even blew up one of the pig's bladders like Pa does in Little House in the Big Woods and let us play with it. Grossed out yet? Sorry. That's the reality of raising and eating food.

At the Burrow, we don't really have room for anything other than our dog. As much as I love that I grew up with pigs and goats and chickens, I'm not sure I'm up for the task as an adult. I now realize how much work my parents had to do...and we complained about having to feed and water them!

But we do live a half mile from the farm where we have a family share. On sunny days, I walk with Evan to pick up cabbages and beets, turnips and greens from the overflowing bins in the cool barn. We fill up the basket under his stroller seat, and park it at the edge of the row of dill and cilantro. After picking herbs for the week, we walk home. Our feet get dirty. Our fingers get stained from the vegetables. This is how your food should come.

I know that I am lucky to live so close to the farm, and to be able to buy a share. I think it is a crime that everyone can't get their food this way if they want to. Organic, fresh food is simply not affordable. Too many people are forced to buy whatever the grocery store happens to have in stock from the other side of the country. Even that is too expensive. What's affordable? Pasta. Rice. Not free range chicken. Not organic, local hakuri turnips.

I don't take the interconnectedness of food for granted anymore. And I'm grateful that Evan will grow up in a place where he has to get his hands dirty before he can wash them for dinner.

Eggs in a Nest

Good news for all of the procrastinators out there...it turns out putting off certain home projects has a major payoff.

When you look at a house, it is easy to say, "If I lived there, the first thing I would do is...(fill in the blank)." Our first thoughts?

Rip out the ugly, farmhouse fence.

Get rid of the 12 foot gate separating the driveway from the yard.

Tear out the Ent.

Then you move into the house. You have new priorities. Reroof the place. Update the electrical panel. Scrub and paint all of the walls to get rid of the lingering cigarette smell. (It helps if your father-in-law and landlord happens to be a do-it-yourself-remodeling-home-maintenance-just-get-it-done-guru.) It also helps to have a large, generous network of family and friends who are willing to do things like roofing, and wiring, and scrubbing, and painting.

In the intervening weeks and months - oh let's face it, years - you might just find that those projects you put off are actually better left alone. The fence turns out to be perfect for containing your unnaturally rambunctious dog. The gate really isn't a big deal once you get used to it, and it keeps the dog from jumping over the back porch and into the driveway. And then there's Ent...

One spring day, it went from looking like a cross between a stump and a fireworks display, to looking like a lush, tropical plant. It does this kind of hula dance, lifting its green branches and organge flowers and swishing them in the breeze. Soon after that, Nate was in the nice, enclosed yard with the dog when a pair of robins began divebombing him. He realized they were protecting a nest...in the Ent.

So here is my advice...if you move into a fixer-upper, let some things go. Not the important stuff, like roofs and electrical maintenance. But the stuff you can live with. Wait and see what surprises might be waiting for you!

Stalking the Burrow: How it all began

"It has kind of a potty-training color scheme," I said to Nate, as the car crawled up the dead end street, eying the yellow vinyl siding and brown metal trim.

It was Autumn of 2007, and we'd bundled up, jumped in the car, and begun a series of stalky drive-bys. We were casing the Burrow. It had been on the market for quite some time, described as a "bungalow". Now, I have always loved the Craftsman style bungalows, with their open floor plans, built in shelving units, deep eaves, and exposed rafters. This was no bungalow.

"You can paint that." Nate said. "And I'd put wood siding on it. I hate vinyl siding."

"What about that fence?" I asked. It was a rusted, wire farmhouse fence, held up by rusting metal posts. "That's pretty ugly."

"Well, you can change the fence." I craned my neck backward as we passed what had to be the world's widest driveway and continued to the top of the street.

We'd been married for four years; I'd been graduated from college for three. We were ready to change things up, try out our wings. We talked about packing a U-Haul and driving cross-country to California. We made several trips to Portland, Maine, looking at houses there. We were pretty serious about getting out of the Valley. And then my brother was killed in Iraq.

Suddenly life was too short, and there wasn't enough time to be around the people you loved. I realized that the only place I wanted to be right then was near my parents and my sisters, Nate's family, which had become my own, and around the friends who had stuck by and supported us.

We parked at the top of the dead end street and crunched across the gravel to the trail head.

"You gotta admit, it's a pretty killer location," Nate grinned, as we stepped into the woods. And it was. The Burrow sits at the bottom of a small mountain, most of which is protected state park. This offers all kinds of advantages, including the fact that the quiet dead end road will never become a through way.

Almost immediately after stepping through the wall of leaves and onto forest path, we came to a trickling stream spanned a little wooden footbridge. It was the first of the many hidden charms we found on the path that day. It winds along the barb-wired edge of a cow pasture. Occasionally, the views open up so that you can see the Valley rippling away into the hills. We smiled at each other. It was the Mountain that sold us on the Burrow.

"What's that thing in the yard?" I asked, as the car inched back by the house.

"I have NO idea." Nate said. We shamelessly stopped in front of the yard. (Let me just say here that since we moved in, a couple of other houses on the street have gone up for sale. We now know exactly how creepy we looked during this period of repeated drive-bys.)

At this time of year, the yard was brown. And right in the middle of the brown yard, there was this...thing. I assumed it was some kind of plant. It looked more like an anemone made of sticks, only nine feet tall. The thing was enormous, and it's stick-like fingers flexed and pointed in the breeze. "It's like an Ent." I said.

"The first thing I'm gonna do if we move in here is rip that thing out." Nate said. He eased onto the gas, and we turned out of C street and headed back home. As we drove away, I squinted back at the property. "Geez, there sure are a lot of sheds."

How to Make Pickles

We have this awesome room atached to our garage called the Man Room. It has a working, brick fireplace and a full kitchen. It is decorated with things like a pair of mounted horns my dad got on a college trip out west, a miniature moose with real fur (given to Nate by a customer at the bank), and a wooden sign engraved with the chemical compound testosterone (thanks Keith!). But before its days of masculine glory, the Man Room was the place where the ladies of C Street gathered to make jams and jellies.

"Yeah, we don't do it anymore," Helen told me one day, over the back fence, eyeing the pile of junk in our back shed, "But we used to all get together and can in there." In my mind's eye, I saw the wood panneled room filled wth bustling ladies in aprons, using canning jar tongs and sipping gin and tonics while pots of berries bubbled on the stove.

After that conversation, I found myself longing to can vegetables. There is something about the idea of people gathering together to preserve food that strikes a chord with me. It's the same reason I learned to bake bread. Not that I believe the world is going to end but...if it ever came down to living in a post-apocolyptic, zombie-ridden world, I would have the skills to survive.

And on a more practical note, I think it is important to bring community back into the kitchen. We eat our food so fast, without thinking about it. We barely know what it is we are putting into our bodies. There is something satisfying about knowing where your food comes from, and what is in it. So when I got the email from our farm share saying I could buy $20lbs of pickling cucumbers for $15, I jumped at the opportunity.

I bought the cucumbers and started calling in the troops: "Wanna make pickles?" I texted Erica. "Still interested in slow food?" I messaged Kelley. "Know any pickle recipes?" I facebooked...Three days later, armed with Mya's sweet pickle relish recipe, about $70 worth of pickling supplies (don't worry, I returned a lot of stuff...see below), and a round of CapeCodders and CapeNotters, Erica, Kelley, Cheryl and I gathered in the kitchen.

I won't go into the nitty-gritty details of actually making pickles, because it honestly isn't that hard. There is a lot of chopping, and boiling, but it is really pretty doable, especially with four people. I also won't share Mya's recipe because it is hers to share, but suffice-it-to-say, it is DELISCIOUS. I will share the link for the refridgerator pickle recipe that we used. And I will offer a bit of advice about preparing for your pickle making adventures ahead of time.

Step 1: Read ALL of the directions first.

This will save you embarassing return trips to the grocery store during which you sheepishly try to explain to the highschool checkout clerk that you would never return groceries, except, what are you supposed to do with the extra two gallons of vinegar you bought?

Step 2: Reread the directions.

This will ensure that your friend, who unfortunately got tasked with the tedious job of finely chopping 12 cups of vegetables, isn't nine onions short of a relish recipe. (Sorry Cheryl!)

Step 3: Ask for help.

Yes, there are people who want to come to your house and stand around in a steamy hot, un-airconditioned kitchen sterilizing jars and mincing vegetables and brewing vinegar concotions that make your breath catch in your throat.

Step 4: Get a babysitter.

Or maybe someone to sit in the living room and play with your son who for some reason refuses to take either a morning or afternoon nap on the day of your pickling extravaganza. Although, I must say, baby Adeline was a model participant.

Step 5: Remodel your kitchen.

Okay, this step may not be practical, but having all of those people working in my kitchen made me really think about how we want to lay out that room when we get around to renovating it.

Step 6: Clean off your camera card and charge your battery.

Or you won't be able to take any pictures of the beautiful cucumbers! Thank god Erica was there...check out her pics and post about pickling at http://www.lifeonharwich.blogspot.com/.

After that, it is simply a matter of good company, and patience. The refridgerator pickles we made should be ready for tasting sometime this afternoon, and ready for eating by the end of the week. The relish is already deliscious. And so is the sweet satistfaction of reestablishing a C Street tradition in the Burrow kitchen.

Treasure Chest

After our Renegade Women Day (we changed the name for political reasons), Jan and I stopped by the cottage to pick up a trunk that I left behind when we moved out. The cottage is about the size of the t.v. we moved yesterday - big for a television, small for a house. It is also lived in by a Davis, so it wasn't that creepy that we just showed up and raided the basement.

It had been a while since I'd opened that trunk, so I wasn't quite sure what I'd find in it. I meant to wait until baby was down for his nap, and I could systematically rummage through my old belongings, but I couldn't wait. After Jan left, I dragged it up on the back porch and popped open the lid. (To be fair, here, I should tell you that this is a blue Rubbermaid trunk. But if you have been picturing an old, wooden trunk with brass bindings and a fabulous lock that needed to be sprung open, please go with that instead. It's much more in keeping with what I found inside). What did I find?

Pieces of Home.

Nestled inside were my old friends, Lambie, Cowie, and Froggy. (I wasn't a particularly creative kid.) And of course the teddy bear that my dad gave my mom when she was pregnant with me to keep her company while he was busy with the army. The poor bear didn't even get a name. But I loved it...so much that it now has no nose, and no stuffing in any of its limbs.

I also found a few of my beloved children's books: Captain Kitty - which my father can still recite verbatim, and But No Elephants. I'm told that I used to cover my eyes when we got to the page where Grandma Tildy goes apeshit over the elephant breaking through her pantry floor.

I found a box of notes from high school friends, and a box of letters from my friend Bonnie, who moved to Colorado when I was in middle school. Probably the best find was my dad's sixth grade composition book in which he stated his lifelong ambition to become a priest...on Mars, "Or if we've only gotten to the moon by then, I'll settle for that." But I won't say anymore because I think he should write about that.

In a brown cardboard box, I found my baby book, elementary school work, varsity softball letter and other artifacts from my childhood. As I sifted through the items, I realized that my mother was the one who packed them all for me when I went away to college. She had lovingly tucked them away when I was too busy or too cool to realize that someday it would mean a lot to me to see my tiny five-month-old hand outlined on blue paper, or silky my old blanket against my cheek. Everything that I love about Home - the coziness you feel in your clean pajamas after a bath, the sweetness of warm milk and honey when you can't sleep, huddling under the covers with a book (now a Kindle) after everyone else has gone to sleep - everything I want to pass on to Evan, I can thank my parents for giving to me.

"It's so beautiful!" I crooned inwardly to myself, as I set my beloved toys out for Evan to play with, and to love and to cherish, just as I did.

He preferred to play with the camera case.

Oh well. I appreciated it. Thanks mom! Thanks dad!

Rogue Women

"I have a t.v. to recycle," I tell the guy in the pink shirt at the Best Buy customer service counter.

"Great," he says, peering over the counter.

"It's in the car. It's...big." I explain. Major understatement.

"I'll call Rodrigo." He punches a couple of numbers into the phone.

"You might need two people." I say. He gives me that look. The one that says, Lady, we do this all the time. Rodrigo can totally handle it.

"You really need two people. It's big."

"How big?" He humors me.

I spread my arms out as far as they will go. He looks unimpressed. Then I indicate the depth of the tv. Still nothing.

Rodrigo shows up. I explain. The guy in the pink shirt is skeptical, but pleasant. They call another Best Buy Guy and follow me out to the van. I open the slider.

It's not Rodrigo's fault. I'm sure he is a perfectly manly guy. But he didn't stand a chance on his own. My dad passed this behemoth on to us when they got their new one. Quite a character - the t.v. not my dad. Well okay, my dad is a character, too, but that isn't really pertinent to the t.v. story. It was a great t.v. until it caught fire one day. Then it was relegated to the garage where old appliances, scrap wood, and excess cardboard go to die.

And there the mammoth languished for months until a couple of days ago when Jan asked if I'd be up for a Rogue Women Day. This is a concept she came up with wherein women take it upon themselves to do those ornery projects that we generally depend on our men to do. (Projects our men generally put off until they are forgotten - and who can blame them, really?).

"Best buy will recycle your t.v. for ten dollars." She explained. Sign me up.

So here we are, and Rodrigo and Best Buy Guy are struggling to ease the electronic boulder onto a low shopping cart. Clunk. The right, front wheel breaks.

Suddenly, and inexplicably, I am proud of my old, broken television. I am proud that it is too big for Rodrigo to handle on his own, and proud that it broke the shopping cart. I try not to gloat. Then the t.v. falls off the cart in the doorway.

"You can go to the service desk," Rodrigo pants.

We walk away, leaving the t.v. there in the doorway like one of those granite blocks state parks put in front of roads they don't want you to drive on. Customers pick their way around it, baffled.

I pay for the t.v., and Rodrigo hands me a $10 gift card. Good deal.

When we get back home, Jan and I peer into the garage to look at the big empty spot where the t.v. used to sit. We note the rest of the junk that still needs to be cleaned out.

"Checking out the neighbor's garage?" Helen, the little old lady who lives next to us, chuckles.

"Cleaning it out," I reply. See? We DO TOO do work around here...

"Yeah, I saw your husband moving it out of the garage this morning." (Yeah, that's right, my husband is stronger than Rodrigo.) "It looked like it was almost too much for him."

"It was almost too much for the two of us," I motion to Jan and myself. "We had to drag it from the front of the garage on the ground, pivoting it from side to side. We barely got it in the van."

"I know, I saw you."

That's Helen. Always watching. She's a bit of a Rogue woman herself.

Welcome to the Hannibal Lecter Basement

You know when you change the focus on a camera? At first a small object in the foreground, like a bee, or a flower, is all your eye can make out. But then when you change the focus, the grass or the other flowers come into view behind it. Well, imagine looking through what you thought was a lattice covered window in your basement. Instead of flowers, what my eyes made out in the dim light was that the wall did not end behind the lattice. Instead there was a secret, basement room.

It all started the day we got the house inspected. That day, I screamed out loud twice. Was I alone in the dark, cobweb filled basement? No. I was with two grown men. The first time it was because the wind blew across the top of one of the unused chimneys. There is this circular metal valve that does something...not sure what, and the wind made it scrape across its casing creating this really creepy sound. It's the kind of noise you might expect a monster to make in the basement...if you believed in that sort of thing.

But the second scare...that was worse, by far. You see, at one time there was a three season porch on the house. Somewhere along the line, a previous owner decided to enclose it and make it part of the house. Now it is a great, sun-filled dining room. Lined with windows on three sides, the light spills in and brightens the house throughout the day. That's upstairs. Down in the Pit of Despair it is a different story.

There is a basement underneath the sunny dining room. But that basement was built AFTER the rest of the basement. So it is sort of hidden. Okay, here is where it gets creepy. When the original basement was built, it had some of those little, rectangular windows along the top of the wall. Normal. What's so scary about that, you ask. Well, when the sunny dining room basement was added, it was added onto the outside of that wall.

When we went down in the basement with the home inspector I saw this regular basement wall with two little windows covered with raggedy, spider-webbed, red curtains. Using a stick, I pushed the curtain aside, expecting to look out onto the grass at ground level. But instead there was this little, plastic lattice thing. "Well that explains why there's no light coming through the curtains..."I thought to myself. And then my eyes adjusted.

Welcome to the Hanibal Lecter Basement. It is a low ceilinged room with spiderwebs hung from the floor to ceiling. The ground was dirt, not cement. When I shined my flashlight in, I could see that, other than the windows into the main basement, where I stood, there was no way in or out. The perfect place for a cannibalistic serial killer to hide his victims.

I screamed again.

This is what I have to deal with every time I want to do the laundry, or any time I want to gather up some hiking gear, or put one of the baby's old toys into storage. Sometimes - and I know I shouldn't be admitting this on the Internet - but sometimes I even sing songs from old musicals out loud to keep the mood up while I dash from the top of the stairs to the dryer and back.

And it has to stop. I mean, I have a kid now. I can't just say, "Evan, you can walk now. It is your responsibility to do the laundry because mommy is too scared to go in the basement alone."