The Pirate Cave

I'll have you know we just completely filled our dumpster full of trash from our cellar. The long-dreaded task is completed. The cellar is clean. If you're looking for great northern white beans, you can find them now. If it's nasal decongestion you want, easy. If you're interested in VHS tapes, they're all neatly displayed on racks. There's even a rug on the floor down there awaiting the bowflex-type exercise thing my husband is intent on getting. And a TV to watch motivational tapes while he bowflexes.

I have to admit that putting a rug and other such fru-frah down there is really lipstick on a pig, though, because our cellar is just that. A cellar. An old dug-out ~ half finished with concrete, but a root cellar, nonethless. It doesn't dignify the word "basement."

We call it the pirate cave.

The original root cellar was probably dug in the early days of the house (which is almost 100 years old). Then, in the seventies, someone built an addition over the cellar and dug a tunnel connecting it to an access door in the main part of the house. Lots of fun for imaginative children. Kind of creepy if you don't care much for eight-legged visitors. And, with dirt walls half way up, there's not much we can do to make it look, um, posh.

But, then, we wouldn't know what to do with posh. It'd probably embarass us.

It's a nice pirate's cave, though. When we go down after canned food, it feels like retrieving booty.

"She wanted canned corn, ye say?"

I've got some pictures of the real thing here, but they're not going to impress you ~ unless you're a member of my family and know what it looked like before we cleaned. It was an astounding mess down there. When we moved, everything that was questionable was thrown down-cellar, you see... And, well, it's taken me this long to get the ~ oomph? ~ to clean it all up.

Yeah, it was shameful.

But I wanted to show that you really can get on top of even the most dreaded jobs, if you just tackle 'em ~ and keep at it until you're done. Trust me ~ if I can clean our cellar in one looooong day with only the help of the under-ten crowd, and live to laugh about it, anybody can do anything.

One cellar down, two garages and one barn to go!