My grandfather's dream was to retire in Florida.
One day he packed up his truck and headed down the interstate to Florida. He couldn't get past Atlanta before having a heart attack. He spent the rest of his retirement years in the Veteran's Administration hospital.
While he was in the hospital a great flood came to Chicago's Northwest Side. I think it was 1987. Some of the neighbors had to escape their houses on canoes to get to dry land.
I guess we were lucky because no one was in my grandfather's house at the time. A couple weeks later the water resided and my brother and I went with my dad to clean up my grandfather's house to get it ready to sell.
As a young teenage boy I thought it was exciting to see the damage of the flood. The place where my grandfather had carefully tended his vegetables for forty years had become a puddle of mud. The basement still had water up to my knees. My dad had us wear long rubber fishing boots and told us to wear masks and gloves when we clean.
We had large bags in the back yard to dispose of my grandfather's old stuff that was damaged from the flood. We were supposed to put anything valuable we found on the back porch. My brother and I started back to the basement again to collect what we could find.
We felt like pirates who found a sunken treasure ship. We took shovels and dumped out piles of sewage and mold. Most people would be turned off by this kind of job, but at the time I loved it. Even though I was wearing a mask I could smell the mold and sewage and with each breath I felt a little bit like a sewer rat.
We sorted through old toys from my cousins who had lived in the basement. The older cousin had collected trolls and I remember how she used a mini brush to comb the troll's hair. None of them were salvageable now. I remember my grandpa used to keep his jelly candies in a glass jar in the kitchen. It was turned upside down and stained black with sewage. The water level had reached the top of the basement and covered part of the first floor of the house.
As I walked up the stairs carrying a pile of my cousin's barbie dolls out of the basement I was startled. I smelled something familiar and then I could hear noises and see pictures from the past. The smell was Virginia Slims smoke still embedded into the ceiling of the back porch. The noise was the hoarse voice from the woman who used to live there after my grandmother had passed away. She used to sit on a little table on the back porch and smoke.
This woman had also passed away just a couple years before the flood. She thought chain smoking was a good way to loose weight. One year she seemed fine and then the next year she just disintegrated because of the spread of cancer. It was chilling to me at that moment how real her presence was felt in the room even though there was no one there.
I looked in the cupboard and found some cucumbers my grandfather had pickled three or four years ago. This was hardly the treasure I had been expecting. The house was almost cleaned out of anything of value. The sofas were damaged by the flood. The few electronics he had were useless. I walked toward the living room and thought to myself:
"As long as I'm here I might as well take a look at the den."
As I passed through the living room I remembered Christmas Days we spent here getting hyper off my grandpa's jellies. I never did find out what he put in those jellies, but sugar was a major ingredient.
I remember the Christmas tree and so many big presents. I remember my cousins laughing and my brother making jokes. The magic of the living room was snuffed out by the flood like a candle snuffed out by the wind. The whole first floor was covered in about ten inches of mud. The smell of cigarettes and stale beer was mixed with a moldy sewage smell that still lingers in my head.
I opened the door of the den to be greeted by sparkles of light coming from the afternoon sun through the bay window. The light reminded me of why I liked that room so much. Most of the house was dark. My grandfather put up thick curtains in the windows ever since his first wife, my grandmother, went to be with the Lord.
His life and his health started to go downhill ever since that point. He eventually married the lady down the block that had moved in with him, but she also passed away shortly after they married. In brief his life was much like his house. At one time it was flourishing with life and light and beautiful people and then suddenly a storm hit turning everything upside down.
No one explains these things to you when you are twelve years old. You just look around at the mud everywhere and begin to pick up clues. I knew this den was the place my real grandmother liked the most. There was a simple desk and chair and a small bookshelf with her violin on top.
Dad! Grandma's violin is here!
My dad came into the room, looked up. He asked me to take the violin down from the shelf. I took it down and gave him the case. He unzipped it and looked at the violin until tears rolled down his cheeks. He closed up the violin and told me:
"Put this in the car."
I went to the car and came back and my dad was still there sitting on his mom's chair, leaning against his mom's desk with his mom's book in his hands. I came a little closer and my dad was looking at the cover page of a very old edition of the play script of Peter Pan. On the second page it said,
Dear (Grandma's name). May you never grow up.
Then it was signed, "James Barrie".
My dad showed it to me and smiled.
My grandmother's collection of books gave me insight into who my father was. He lost his mother when he was only ten years old, but he remembered her books. He kept her copies of Walden, Cape Cod and the Maine Woods. There are more than a few of her books that he still keeps with him this day in his own den.
That afternoon thirty five years ago my dad and I shared something together that we didn't tell anyone about. His dad was a tough truck driver and my dad was a journey man machinist. They were tough guys, but they secretly enjoyed fine music, art and literature. I learned where my love for books and art and music comes from. It came from a person I never met, but a person my father loved and respected as much as life itself.
I also picked up a really bad mold allergy that day. After the second exposure to mold I found that I could never walk into a moldy room again without breaking out and sneezing out of control.
The above story was written in response to the inkwell's 29th creative-nonfiction prompt "clean".
The story is completely AI free. The pictures are my own @mineopoly. Although they are not the original pictures from 1987 they are pictures of cleaning house.
For everyone that can stand borderline British humor and Alexei Sayle then this youtube link of the Young Ones may be entertaining. There are some correlations between this episode and my story.
