Imps

I love unfinished houses.
I love houses that aren't perfect.

When Steve and I were looking at houses years ago when we were first married, we looked at two houses.
They were about the same size and on about the same amount of land. They were both in good neighborhoods.
One was perfectly finished. In fact, it was an over-achiever as far as houses went and even had built in desks in the kids' bedrooms.
The second had a big family living in it. Rooms were shared. The basement had a huge storage area for canned fruit and buckets of wheat. The basement was unfinished.
While loving the perfect house, I hated it. It had no room for change. It was finished.

The house we are in right now was supposed to be a pit-stop as we found our perfect house. It is over 100 years old. It is constantly in some state of disrepair, as old houses are. And I love it. And I hate it. I beat myself up that I haven't finished this or painted that, and yet, whenever I see another house, it's mine I want.
It is charming. It has windows on all sides - and probably had great views at one point in its life. Now, all windows point to neighbors and roads, but though they are single-paned, they let in an enormous amount of sunshine (and drafts.)

My favorite house was another house that needed work. It was my house when I was growing up. It had a great yard for playing, tall trees for shade, and a grassy slope to roll down.
The basement was unfinished and was a storage area of outdated toys (god's honest truth: there was a pachinko game down there. Coolest thing ever.) from my siblings - since I had brothers and my dad was in the military, there were GI Joes and toy machine guns. I LOVED playing down there.

My mom always worried about my being down there. She worried about black widow spiders (I never saw one down there, but who knows?) and she worried about it being too chilly for me. She told my grandma, her mother, about her worry. My grandma asked to talk to me on the phone, and she told me that imps lived in the basement. "What are imps?" I asked her. "Imps are demons. They belong to the devil. They are bad. Don't play in the basement where they are." Though I don't remember exactly what she said, that conversation was similar enough; that was what I heard.

My maternal grandma lied to my cousins and me all the time, and I knew she lied. So I understood that she wanted me to be afraid. As an adult, I wonder what the hell she was thinking, telling my child self that. And it makes so much sense that I will not lie to my children or grandchildren. Ever. I will tell them the true things to be worried about, if I fear for their safety, but making a child scared so that they are obedient is nothing but sheer evil.