Basement

A day or two before the beloved comes home from New York each week, I do laundry. Usually it is just the clothes that I have worn during the week. Occasionally an outfit or two that the beloved wore during the previous weekend. The laundry in our mid-Michigan hideaway is in the basement. Most laundry spaces in Michigan are in the basement. It makes me miss my first floor laundry in Maryland and how easy it is to do a load or two during the week. On the wish list for the next house, beside land for dog-roaming and gun-toting, is laundry near the bedrooms and a giant soaker tub.

The basement laundry means that while I am doing laundry, I lose my shadow-boy Tibe. Yes, Tibe is my shadow these days. I move from room to room and he comes with me. On more than on occasion, Emma has just rolled her eyes as if to say, Calm down, Ti. She isn’t really going anywhere. Basement laundry though means I lose my shadow. Tibe will not go into the basement. Anywhere.

He has always hated them. We have a basement in Maryland and he never went down there. Ever. As if something happened once down there and he did not want to return. This fact about our little pup was one of the things that was heart-breaking about packing Tibe off to his temporary shelter when animal control insisted he could no longer live with us. Tibe stayed at a great home, with a great set of adults who loved him very much and a little baby who was also fond of little Tibe, but he had to live in the basement. It was a lovely basement. Refinished. With a big comfy couch. It was the very best option that we had. Still, a basement.

It was almost as if Tibe knew it was the best option, though, because he never objected. When I visited and walked him in the neighborhood and we returned, he would happily go barreling down the stairs with me. It was as if he knew those eighteen days were grueling for all of us. The uncertainty. Emma’s disorientation. Missing Tibe at night while sleeping and during the work days. Tibe knew that my emotional state was such that I could not survive struggling with him to get him in the basement. So he jauntily took those steps down to the basement for eighteen days. Happy to greet me when I came to visit and content when I departed. As if he knew I would return. As if he knew after the interregnum, he would never have to go into a basement again.

And he never does. No more basements for Tibe.