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 was unfinished, and had a huge storage area for canned fruit and buckets of wheat.
While I loved the perfect house, I also didn't love 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 often are. And I love it. And I detest 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, yet they also they let in an enormous amount of sunshine (but also drafts.)

Another of my favorite houses 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The basement was unfinished and stored many of our old, outdated toys (there was a pachinko game down there! Coolest thing ever.) The toys were from my siblings' childhood, but I loved their old toys! There were even GI Joes and toy machine guns - toys I'd never been given for Christmas! I LOVED playing down there in the damp smelling, cool rooms.

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 was what I heard. 

But even the idea of Grandma's imps couldn't spoil my love for basements! Maybe I'm a weirdo, but I love the damp, dank smell. I love the feeling of being safe, even though I do find creepy crawly insects down there and I do come face first into a spiderweb down there.