I’m not sure what percentage of homes in Prescott have a dirt room, but when I ask people if they have one, I usually get a blank look. I don’t mean a mud room where you take off your wet shoes and mucky boots before entering the house, I mean an actual room with dirt floors, crumbly rocks, and gnarly tree roots poking through some areas.
The first time we opened the door to the dirt room we weren’t sure what to make of it, other than to marvel at the immense amount of potential storage space. It was even two levels, with a back section five feet higher than the main room. It had an extra dose of creepy with a cool, musty smell of damp dirt, rafters with exposed insulation, an occasional centipede, mouse poop running along the cement foundation walls, plus a packrat nest in the far corner. And spiderwebs. So many spiderwebs.
We cleared out the critters, sawed off the overgrown roots poking through the upper level, and dropped some sheets of plywood down so we could store boxes and Christmas decorations. We installed shelves to stock canned food and extra supplies, like our Covid-era toilet paper and Lysol wipes collection. And slowly over the years, the dirt room transformed into a place where we stored the things we thought we needed to keep for later, even when we weren’t quite sure when later might be.
One day, as we were moving things around on the shelves to fit more stuff in, we took a good look around and something finally snapped. How many emergency back-up office chairs do two people really need? The answer is not five. Did I ever truly use all the bins filled with Christmas décor? Why did we still have a 1980s Atari gaming console we hadn’t hooked up in twenty years? There were shelves of old computer gear from our previous business. A vintage road bike I kept telling Mike I was sure I’d ride again was squashed behind a pine headboard that didn’t fit our bed and a wrought-iron footboard we never installed in the guest room. We began hauling things out to the garage for a serious review and agreed to the ground rules that nothing that came up from the dirt room would go back down again. If we couldn’t use it in the house right now, we’d donate or sell it.
We grabbed totes and cardboard boxes from the dusty shadows of the upper level, hauling them down to the floor and prying them open to see what labels like “Grandpa stuff” and “house stuff” really meant. It’s at least twelve years since we packed those bins and I couldn’t remember what was in them. I hoped it would be amazing, important items worthy of the time I took to carefully wrap them in newspapers and keep them safe for all these years. Most of it wasn’t. I hesitated over a few musty schoolbooks with my mom’s name written neatly inside the covers, but I have her handwriting on better things.
I’m happy to report we re-homed the headboard and footboard. Three bikes were donated to C&C Cyclery for their “Pay It Forward” program. We even sold a few of the nicer office chairs. Several carloads went to thrift stores around town. The garage is still a little messy, but we’ll get there.
From all the bins we sorted through, my favorite find is a slightly crushed white cardboard box from a now-defunct Iowa department store. On one side it says “Holland Dutch Tea Towels” in my grandma’s handwriting and on another “Imported Dutch Dish Towels” in my mother’s handwriting. Inside, wrapped in yellowing tissue paper, are six lovely cotton dishtowels in bright colors, still in their original wrappers with an illustration of a Dutch windmill and the word “sneldroger” which Google translated as “quick dryer.” I’m guessing these are souvenirs from a trip they took in 1963, when my grandma was younger than I am now. I pulled one out of the box, peeled the label off, and hung it next to the dishtowel we were using. It fit right in, like something I might have picked myself.
Each morning now, when I go to the kitchen to make my coffee, I see it there hanging there, a cheerful green and orange plaid. I imagine my mom and grandma trying to decide which ones to choose and finally settling on two of each pattern. After 61 years of hiding out in a box, I can even report it does seem to dry dishes quickly. Maybe it’s trying to make up for lost time. And I’m glad to get to put a special piece of the past to use instead of storing it away for later.