Buried Treasure (or "You never know what you'll find in the attic")

I cleaned out my "Texas Basement" recently. What is a Texas Basement you ask? Well, if you live in the far south of the state, you find the water table is too high for basements (unless you want bragging rights to an "indoor swimming pool" of dubious water quality). So the typical basement is not found down here. And due to the heat and humidity, an attic isn't the best solution either. The first time we lived in Houston (back in 1979), I found a fabulous 4 wick candle at an after Christmas sale and packed it away in the attic with all the other decorations. The next Christmas, all I found was a box with a candle-shaped void in it with a wick laying on the bottom. Naive young adult that I was, I wondered WHO had stolen my candle but left the wick?

Oh I miss my brain sometimes. I'm convinced that, though I'm an American, my brain is Australian because it "goes on walkabout" sometimes.

Back on the road of "what point are you trying to make about what a Texas basement is"-ville, a Texas basement is a room upstairs (not down below), usually an attic room or an unfinished "bonus room" that you dry-wall, add heating/air-conditioning to, put down flooring, doorway and electrics to make an Uber-attic - not nice enough to be a proper bedroom but not primitive enough to die of heat or freeze to death when working in there. It utilizes space that would not work for living space due to, say, the angle of the ceiling or awkward room layout or location over a noisy garage door - or in our case, room access is through another bedroom, through a closet and then being located over the aforementioned noisy garage...



And mine is a doozey! It not only has deep shelving with tall spaces in the center of the room, it also has lots of space under the eaves and around the periphery so I can stack, store and pile things and STILL have room to walk around those center shelves. And I also was able to put in a desk/table so I can do gift-wrapping, scrap-booking, etc. Which brings me (finally) to why I'm posting.




All our photographs and "warm fuzzy" family keepsakes are up there - letters received, letters from the kids pushed under doors late at night when they were children, "atta boy" notes to Mike from his Amoco/Bp days, that sort of thing. And I liked to clip interesting magazine and newspaper articles. I was searching for a poem I knew I'd kept somewhere when I came across two newspaper clippings that caught my attention. They not only caught my eye, but I had to sit down and read them through - twice. And I decided to share them because now, more than ever before, did they seem to really speak to not only me but the US in general.

So my next two posts will NOT be authored by me. They will be "reprints" (re-types?) of these two clippings in the hopes that YOU find them as encouraging as I do.

And we all need a little (LOT???) of encouragement these days, right?

And a Texas basement. Definitely a Texas basement.