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."