SHAME AND THE LEAKY BASEMENT

My mother-in-law, a very fine woman, had a premonition of her approaching death. The reason I say this is because that summer in her last few weeks she decided to mend all the disagreements and minor feuds she had ever had. Bad feelings tend to flourish in Cincinnati, as any native-born Cincinnatian would know. All it takes is for some relative in a previous generation to have married a Catholic (or a Protestant), and it is enough to set off a first class feud that can last for years and involve dozens of relatives. My mother-in-law inherited some of this. This particular summer she drove all over Cincinnati to find people she had not seen for years. She apologized to her brother-in-law for her harsh words about him; she put flowers on some graves in Spring Grove Cemetery. I didn't know why she was doing this. But when my mother-in-law died suddenly of a brain aneurysm the slate was clear.

I must be approaching my own sudden demise, because I have begun to brood late at night about some things I have done, which I now regret. There are a few things (not many) that I am ashamed of. I haven't been able to tell anyone, and some I will never reveal. But, like my sweet mother-in-law, I can try to make a clean beast of a few of these. This one involves, of all things, a leaky basement.

My husband and I and two babies were living in a small house, one of the first "prefabs", which came in parts and had to be reassembled on a lot. The contractor was a genuine con man. If anything wrong could have been done to that house, it was. The crux was the basement, constructed of cinder block and apparently totally without any provision for drainage around the foundation. It rains a lot in Cincinnati. The water poured through cracks in the basement walls, and seeped up all around the floor. Sometimes I would go down there and hold a cocktail shaker up to one of the worst cracks. The shaker would fill up in seconds. At night I would lie in bed and hear the pounding of rain, imagining the disaster that was beneath us. It was awful.

We were young and tried to make the best of things. My husband put this compound (I think it was called Thoroseal) all over the walls with little effect. We must have bought pounds of it. We kept quiet about this ghastly problem because it would have been embarrassing in our little upscale community. There seemed to be no solution short of building an entire new basement and we could never have afforded that. Finally we could stand it no longer and decided to sell the house and move to a house with walls made of iron.

But first, we had to mask the problem we had lurking in the basement and snare a buyer. Fortunately the gods smiled on us and we had about a month of dry weather. My husband totally Thorosealed the walls and put up sides of pegboard. On the pegboard we hung artistic displays of rakes and hoes, tools of all kind, bikes and skis. The whole thing looked like a craftsman's paradise. When I think back on this, I am ashamed. In a week the house was sold to a picture perfect couple with an beautiful blond baby . We didn't drive past it unless we had to - I heard later that they were having channels built around the foundations . I hoped that nice young mother wasn't lying there at night listening to the storms. And what must they think of us? It's sixty years ago, but I'm sorry. Unfortunately, I think I would do it again if I had to. I haven't liked basements since then and now I live in the desert, which is the best place to live.