Bird Stamps

When she was sleeping, I would go down to the basement. The stairs down to the basement had a railing my grandfather welded together from pieces of steam pipes. My dad painted the stairs, railing, and a portion of the cement floor battleship blue, his favorite color, a color my mom only let him use in the basement. The moldy air from annual floods down there tickled the inside of my nose and made me sneeze in threes. A single light bulb barely illuminated the foot of the stairs, enough to see dead crickets scattered around the sump pump in the corner. To the right behind a wall of floor to ceiling boxes was partial view of an antique glass cabinet, a place my dad could protect and conserve his VIP junk. I could make out a couple of model airplanes in there but the file cabinet in front of the boxes was too heavy to move. His clever way of making sure no one messed with his precious models. To the left was a set of shelves, sagging in the middle, with boxes, suitcases, and plastic bins. And then there were the garbage bags. Mom’s method of manically getting rid of anything she saw as junk was to throw it out in a plastic 30-gallon garbage bag. Sometimes her definition of junk was anything on the floor in my room, or all my brother’s GI JOE gear, or loose papers on the dining room table—whatever happened to be in her way. One afternoon she emptied the mess of papers on my father’s desk into a garbage bag. When he came home that evening to discover this, he screamed a curse word we’d never heard come from his mouth, “GOD DAMMIT ANNA! All of our savings bonds were in those papers.” After that, the garbage bags stopped going into the trash and instead were hurled down the basement stairs.