Thirty One Days in the Church Basement

The Stockings

The first week of December, I came back from a shift at the nursing home and found the kitchen ladies in the basement with a step stool and a bag from the dollar store.

There is a row of iron coat hooks by the bottom of the basement stairs, the old kind, where people hang their coats during potlucks. Four of them now had red felt stockings hanging from them.

Each one had a name stitched across the white cuff in red yarn. Brody. Kenzie. Cole. Lily.

Doris Albright had stitched them. Doris is eighty-three, and her hands shake, and the letters were a little crooked, and I have never seen anything more beautiful in my life.

“You can’t have Christmas without stockings,” Doris said. “Even in a basement. Especially in a basement.”

I sat down on the bottom step. I could not even thank her. I just sat there.

Lily came running when she saw hers. She could not read yet, but she knew the shape of her own name. She touched the L with one finger.

“This one’s mine,” she said. “Is Santa going to find the camping house?”

“Santa knows where every camping house is,” Doris said. “He’s been doing this a long time.”

Every morning after that, the first thing Lily did when she woke up was walk over in her purple hat and check her stocking. It was always empty. She checked it anyway. Then she would come back to her cot and tell me, “Not yet.”

The Rental

The insurance finally came through in the second week of December. The adjuster approved the rebuild and the living expense money, and Gail at the agency called me herself to tell me.

The trouble was finding somewhere to live. Our town does not have many rentals, and most landlords hear “four kids” and get quiet. Ann made calls. Pastor Dan made calls. Harold made calls, which mostly meant he stood in people’s driveways until they agreed to things.

A little two-bedroom on Elm Street opened up. It was not big. The boys would share a room, the girls would share a room, and Travis and I would have the pullout couch when he was home. It was four blocks from the school.

Move-in day was December eleventh. Day thirty-one.

I would like to tell you I was happy to leave the basement. I was, and I wasn’t. I had cried more in that basement than I had in my whole life. I had also been loved there more than I knew a person could be.