My Basement Apartment

When I told my colleagues that I moved into a basement apartment they wondered what went wrong. How did a nice middle class former homeowner end up in a basement? People say I should spin the story and call my home a garden apartment. But I call it what it is, a basement.

I gave up homeownership more than twenty years ago. After my husband died, I sold our ranch house in Jackson, Mississippi and moved with my youngest daughter to Wayne, Pennsylvania. The first apartment we rented was not a pleasant experience. The young mother who lived beneath our apartment complained when I swept the kitchen floor at 9 a.m. She said I kept her from sleeping in. That’s one reason why I’m happy now living in a basement. No one lives under me to complain.

After my lease ran out on that apartment, my middle daughter joined us and we moved into a furnished, stucco house built in the 1920s. It had its quirks. For example, the sun had turned portions of the royal blue shag carpet bright purple. Heat poured out of the vents upstairs, forcing us into t-shirts and shorts in the middle of winter, while the downstairs remained freezing cold.

After my youngest went off to college and my middle daughter got her own place, I moved into a one-bedroom on the second floor of a bland, brick apartment building. Youngest said it was cheaper and she wouldn’t be home that much anyway. This sufficed for many years. When my youngest was home from school, she slept on a single bed in the bedroom with me, and neither of us minded.

One night while living in this apartment I had a surreal experience. I woke up at 2 a.m. to hear a voice. “Help…Help…I’m in four.” I could barely hear him, but I became convinced he was in trouble. I threw on a robe and ran downstairs to apartment four. The door was unlocked, and as I entered a man called out, “I fell out of bed and I can’t get up.” I found the man lying on the floor in the bedroom. I called 911 and waited for the ambulance. Turns out, he had Parkinson’s disease. His arm had gotten stuck between the wall and the bed. Days later his friend thanked me with a box of four tomatoes.

Two of my daughters eventually settled in Atlanta, so I decided to move down.