Memories, Christmas and Other

 To live in Chicago is to be forever on alert for water, the kind that floods a basement.  I have childhood memories of my father in wading boots moving through the sewer water that filled our basement after a storm.  There seems to be more water the older you get (sorry, California).  I spent the past spring pricing out big Shop Vacs.  They’re better than a bucket, and so are sump pumps, to a point.  The problem with either is you need a power backup if the electricity goes out.  Maybe I should mention here that water usually comes with wind and lightning, both of which do teardown job on power lines.

Water just loves boxes, or cardboard sponges as they’re probably called in water lingo.  And people are hardwired to store things, precious things, in boxes.  So, you can see the problem with Christmas items—all those wonderful glass balls and Nativity pieces drenched in a summer downpour.  And I’m lucky where I live.  The water we get is seepage, not sewage.  But if the house is 80-plus years old, there are plenty of cracks in the foundation to let the water in.  At some point in the last five years, there was a thunderstorm that led me to start throwing out boxes and storing things in those plastic containers you see at Target and Home Depot.

This keeps everything dry, at the expense of memory.  The big computer box from ten years ago or the TV box from twenty gets recycled, and you forget about the time you went shopping, only to get stuck in line behind a crazy person who had Bluetooth long before it was invented.  Or the big box from Marshall Field’s or Weiboldt’s gets tossed and with memories of an aunt now dead over forty years.  Thank heaven for the attic.  Mind the transom and windows, and you can still store your stuff up there in boxes.

Last night, Christmas Eve, Michele took out special holiday mugs stored in a long narrow box that used to contain a Razor scooter.  Clare got it for Christmas when she was eight.  On the first warm day in March, she went scootering out front, hit a bump, fell and broke her arm.  The same day the cast came off, she had Mustang baseball practice that she insisted on going to.  My daughter had a homerun to hit.

And she did.