Cellar (What is A Word Worth)

I can still remember the way it smells. That dingy old cellar full of watermarks that track the floor and dust that sparkles like glitter when the wooden doors are swung open on their hinges. The smell of my grandma’s laundry. And freshly sawed wood from my grandpa’s workshop, a tiny and narrow room shoved into the backmost of the cellar. The larger, sprawling and open room covered carefully with a rug and decorated with toys for my brother and me. Who wants to play in a musty old cellar? Well, we had fun anyways.

Root cellars are used to store vegetables. Potatoes, beets, onions. You know, before we had modern things like refrigerators and freezers and heating and cooling systems in our homes. Probably used more now to store wine. Ours wasn’t like that though, not for jams and cream or old bottles of merlot. It was a little hole dug into the ground, sure, and maybe it was used for those practical things once upon a time- before the town was settled and no one had indoor plumbing. But ours was a homey hole in the ground, and it felt unique if only to us.

I’m pretty sure a good number of houses in my old hometown had cellars. I mean, it’s an old Iowa town and some of the cracks on Main Street are older than me. An old, historical, settled-in-pioneer-days town like that is full of houses centuries old. I never saw any other homes with a cellar, though. And it was a small town, so rest assured that I’ve seen at least one quarter of the houses there. All lacking a cellar.

The phrase cellar door is supposedly one of the most beautiful phrases in the English language. There’s a certain beauty in it; in the way it rolls off your tongue. I wonder if all of those people, those poets and authors and journalists, who find beauty in such a common word have ever seen a cellar door? If they’ve ever played in a cellar while their grandma hummed in the next room, folding laundry. If they ever snuck around in the dark down there and watched the way tiny cracks of light would crawl through the old door barring it shut.

When I was younger we didn’t often use the cellar door as entry, but I remember that they were old and rotted and sitting on a slab of dirty grey concrete. There was something beautiful in that yet, too, and when my grandpa replaced the squeaking and filthy doors with bright new pine it was ugly. There’s no need to replace things that are already beautiful in the way that they’ve seen the world. Maybe not so aesthetically pleasing, but who needs that? Something that has seen things, and speaks about them in that inanimate way that objects do- in how their paint is chipped and flaking and there’s an initial carved into the underside that no one could decipher. That’s what beauty is.