CityView Magazine

on second thought A Anywhere I Hang My Hat Is Home BY MARY ZAHRAN have always regarded their nomadic lives as romantic and adventurous as they travel to the far corners of the globe to make new, if temporary, homes. I envy these families not just for their chance to see the part of me has always envied the life- style of many military families who are re- quired to move every few years to a new post. As a lifelong resident of North Carolina, I was chaos, there now are shelves filled with containers that are labeled and neatly sorted into rows. Sometimes the boxes are even color-coordinated or grouped according to purpose. Sometimes, people even testify that organizing their homes world and immerse themselves in another culture but also for the opportunity (albeit mandated) to "clean house" as they prepare to leave one residence for another. As someone who has lived in the same house for nineteen years, I can tell you that the idea of sorting through all of my pos- sessions is rather daunting. Like the character portrayed by Ma- caulay Culkin in "Home Alone", I am terrified of going downstairs to my basement. However, it's not a growling, sinister-looking furnace that scares the wits out of me; it's something much more menacing — nearly two decades' worth of stuff that I have stored down there. I refer to these possessions as "stuff" has changed their lives: now they have time for yoga, dance lessons and photography classes because they are not spend- ing all their time and psychic energy fretting over their messy houses. (Note: I have never passed up a trip to the beach or a cocktail party because I was too busy worrying about the condi- tion of my basement.) Ironically, our basement is designed to be a because I honestly don't know what much of it is. I know that our Christmas decora- tions are down there in clearly marked, easy- to-find red and green boxes. I can go down there in early December, walk straight to those containers (with- out looking at anything else), take them upstairs, decorate my house, celebrate Christmas, pack up the decorations, and return them to the same spot in the basement until next De- cember. This process is much like the directions on a sham- poo bottle: lather, rinse and repeat. I have been lathering, rinsing, and repeating for many years now. I really do have the best of intentions about cleaning out my basement. I read magazine articles about makeovers that people do on their garages, attics, and closets. The before- and-aſter pictures are always so inspiring: where there once 14 | May/June • 2012 if an atomic bomb were detonated anywhere near our house. Obviously, our only hope for survival in the event of any ity that led to this particular kind of home renovation.) Now, I don't know a lot about home ren- ovations or nuclear explosions, but I don't think that the plywood nailed to the basement walls, sturdy though it is, would guarantee our survival safe haven in the event of a catastrophe such as a tornado or a nuclear blast (I'm not mak- ing up this last part). Originally built in 1940, the basement was converted to a fall-out shelter at the height of the Cold War in the 1950s to protect us during a nuclear attack. (Think of the "duck and cover" drills that every school child experienced during the 1950s and early 1960s when everyone had to hide under a desk to avoid being killed by a bomb, and you understand the mental- catastrophe, whether natural or man-made, would be to sur- round ourselves with all of our boxes of stuff from the past nineteen years and pray that my failure to clean out the base- ment (which I really have been meaning to do) would ulti- mately save our lives. Let's see what the home makeover experts would do with that scenario. CV Mary Zahran lives in Fayetteville in a house with a messy basement. She can be reached at maryzahran@gmail.com. And All My Other Stuff

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