digging out the basement

Twenty years ago, our son wrote in his journal, “Our family is digging a basement under our house this summer. We have a problem because the dirt holding up the house is falling in.”
IN the north, where the freeze line is eight feet below the surface, foundations are so deep that most homes have a cellar or finished basement. We spent two summers shoveling out our dirt cellar to replace it with block walls and a concrete floor.
My main man bought dirt elevators to lift the shoveled dirt out from under the house. Pickaxes in hand, husband, son and the neighbor’s kid picked at the clay where our front porch used to be. One afternoon a soft swoosh and startled yell interrupted me as I read to the pre-schoolers. I dashed to the locked, front screen door, looked down on a scared teenager knee deep in an avalanche of dirt clods. Our 13-year-old dug him out.
As the digging moved under the house, a section at a time, the house was jacked up off the stone foundation and rested on oak beams. When they jacked up the floor beams beneath the baby’s crib the jack slipped. The house dropped two inches to the old foundation. Felt and sounded like and earthquake to me.
I rushed outside, “What happened? Are you OK?”
They were puzzled at my concern. It was just a little slip of the jack. No one understood my concern, not even when I showed them the cracks in the wall behind the baby’s bed.
The rest of that first summer’s digging, my family of guys indulged dear old mom with a reassuring “I’m OK, Mom” when they made a crashing noise.
The second summer’s digging started well – except for the rain. We dug in spite of the rain. We dug because of the rain.
As the rain seeped into the dirt around the house, there was no stone wall to hold it back. Soggy dirt sighed, rolled and tumbled into the basement. As the journalist recorded, “It is raining and the walls are slowly falling into the basement.”
It was only annoying until the day the floor vibrated under me as I fixed lunch. I tiptoed outside and looked under the house. Two oak beams were down. I called my husband at work. His boss let him come home to replace them. After another two days of rain, three beams were knocked out in another corner.
I called for help. The boss asked my knight in muddy armor, “How many beams do you have left?”
“About 12 or 15.”
“It’s not going to fall. You can fix it after work.”
The journal noted, “My mom doesn’t like it. She is more worried about it than anyone else.”
I refused to stay in that house. I packed up my babies and went outside for the rest of the day. Stayed there until my chief engineer returned from work and put those beams back in place. Only then did I go inside and fix supper.
Two months later, concrete block basement walls met the floor rafters of the old house. No one yelled, “I’m OK, Mom,” when things went bump in the dark.
And after a while I even dared let my weight down when I walked in the house.