By Amy Keyes 
The other day I braved my basement. It’s not a place I go often.
The fleeting years of LEGOs and forts and dress-up bins that housed my kids’ childhood, have given way to hours of video games, hangouts with friends, or moments of teenage solitude to escape the times when I’m “doing too much.”
The floors hold long grooves in the wood from years of my kids running back and forth playing basement football: three chances to get from one end to the other without getting smacked down. The walls are smudged and marked from practicing bounce passes when the Minnesota elements got in the way of outdoor basketball practice. The family photos that once hung along the walls lay stacked in the corner, collateral damage of all the things that go flying around down there.
And at center stage, is the giant crack formed by the countless hours of air basketball, a game created by my youngest where you pretend to have a ball and basically just jump and slam the wall repeatedly.
On the rare occasions when I go downstairs, I always get fixated on that giant crack that seemed to come out of nowhere but was actually years in the making. It’s too big not to notice. An exposure of brokenness that always distracts me from anything else going on down there. And it got me thinking about the way I often get sucked into focusing on the wrong stuff when there is so much more to be seen.
Growing up, we had a basement. It was cold and dark, and I was always terrified to go down there alone. I can attribute the defining moment of my fear to Peter Brady and the episode of The Brady Bunch when he introduced me to the rough and tumble Jesse James and his life on the run. For some reason, I began to believe that Jesse James was hiding out in the basement of a suburban Chicago home . . . namely, mine.
I remember vividly the chill that would electrify my spine anytime my parents would ask me to go down those seven thinly carpeted stairs to retrieve something. How I would stand frozen at the top of the steps mustering the courage to make it down and back alive. Tiptoeing down as quietly as I could so as not to wake the dangerous mastermind I believed was hiding out with his horse somewhere in the closet that housed my mom’s gift-wrapping bags, extra blankets, and board games. The only way to make it out unscathed was to be silent and then run full speed back up the stairs to the safety of our family room.
Despite the joy that basement held for me—dance parties with my dad, the thrill of having uninterrupted space to do cartwheels on repeat, the privacy that freezing cold room provided for my friends and me to escape to—I spent years avoiding that basement, convinced I would end up somehow transported back to the Old West, held captive by a mustached vigilante. I clearly had an overactive imagination. And I clearly survived.
I recently went home to visit my parents and celebrate my mom’s 75th birthday. That basement is different now. Filled with bins of toys patiently waiting for visits from the youngest grandkids. The shelves that used to be lined with records and photo albums are now only half full after years of filling bins with the albums of memories we made year after year.
As I lingered at the top of the stairs, I stared down at my past and collected the moments, big and small, that basement created for me. Surprise birthday parties. Dancing with my dad. Hide and seek with my sisters. Years of moment upon moment that defined who I became. And Jesse James. It’s incredible the power of memory a room can hold.
It makes me wonder what my parents thought about when they went down into that room. Or what my kids will remember as they come visit years down the road. What will linger in their minds at the top of the basement steps?
And it made me reflect on how I can reshape my own lens of the cracks in the wall, to remember that those are the lights of childhood shining through. They exist not to reinforce what’s broken, but the magic of the memories made in this room. In this home. In this life.
And as long as Jesse James didn’t follow me from Chicago to Minnesota, and doesn’t climb out of that hole, I plan to let that crack shine the light of childhood for as long I’m able.
by Jenni Brennan 
