Thirty One Days in the Church Basement

The Basement Becomes a Home

I will tell you how a church basement becomes a home, because I did not know it could be done until I watched it happen.

It starts with supper. The women’s circle set up a sign-up sheet on the kitchen door, and by the end of the first week it was full through Christmas. Every night at five-thirty somebody came down those stairs with a casserole dish wrapped in a towel.

We had chicken and noodles. We had ham and beans with cornbread. We had a sour cream enchilada thing that Cole asked for four times. Bev Henderson brought fried chicken again, and this time we ate it.

The kids did homework at the long fellowship tables after school. Brody did algebra, Kenzie did spelling, and Cole did his reading log out loud whether anybody was listening or not. Lily colored on the backs of old church bulletins.

Ann let us use the shower at the parsonage, which sits right behind the church. Every night after supper we went over in a line, the five of us, with towels and a bag of donated shampoo. Ann kept her porch light on for us.

I kept working. I had to. I did my regular shifts at the nursing home, and on the nights I worked, Ann slept on the cot at the end of the row. She was sixty-eight years old, and she never once complained about the canvas.

People at the nursing home helped too. Mrs. Kessler, who is ninety-one and has been my resident for four years, knitted Lily a hat. She had to sit and rest every few rows. It took her nine days. It was purple with a pom-pom, and Lily wore it to bed.

Harold and Cole

Of all of it, I think it was Harold who did the most, and he would hate me saying so.

He came by every afternoon at four. He said it was to check the furnace. The furnace did not need checking every afternoon. He would check it anyway, and then he would sit down at the table by the coffee pot with a beat-up checkerboard.

Cole had never played checkers. Cole is eight and he likes things that blink. The first afternoon he sat across from Harold just to be polite.

Harold beat him in about four minutes.

“Again?” Harold said.

Cole lost forty games in a row. I kept count on the back of a bulletin. Forty. Harold never let him win, not once, and he never made him feel bad about it either. He would just turn the board around and say, “Again?”

“Why won’t he let me win?” Cole asked me one night on his cot.

“Because he respects you,” I said. “When you win, he wants you to know it was real.”

On day twenty-two, Cole jumped two of Harold’s kings in one move and won the game. He jumped up so fast he knocked over his chair. Harold sat back and took his cap off and set it on the table.

“Well,” Harold said. “I’ll be.”