by Gina Hamilton

Coastal Journal Staff

It’s that time of year again, when we drag out boxes from the cold, dingy dungeon we call a basement and consider the best place to put a Christmas tree at Turning Tide Cottage.  This involved careful consideration, but after thinking about it for five minutes or so, we realized the only place to put it is in the window of the coffee room, where no one ever goes in the winter on account of the floor being practically frozen.  

This insures that nobody will be peeking at their presents before the Big Day.  It’s just too darn cold.

We have two basements at Turning Tide Cottage.  One is the ancient root cellar under the ell, which is where we had stored the boxes of gee-gaws and what-nots that make their annual appearance, sure as Orion mounts the southern sky, this time of year.  The coffee room, where the Christmas Tree will live (well, maybe live is not the best term), is directly above the root cellar, and there is very little insulation between it and our toes.  The other is the so-called warm basement, which always has a river running through it, and is extremely damp at the best of times. 

We decided that neither place is the best location for our precious Christmas Memories, however, so we have cleaned out a water closet in which we had been storing the books that won’t fit in the library, and repacked everything to fit in there. 

Somehow, during the move, we lost our Halloween/Dia de Los Muertos box, but I don’t think either one of us really missed it, although we had a really cool papier-mache skull which I might regret not seeing in the future.  The outdoor Halloween lights seem to be gone, but we don’t have an outdoor electrical outlet, so I guess it didn’t matter so much.  Maybe next year we’ll get some solar pumpkins to line the walkway, which isn’t in, either.  But will be in the spring.

In any case, we had hardly any trick-or-treaters.  Maybe we would have had more if we had the little pumpkin luminaria, but I doubt it.  I guess we know what Santa will be sticking in our socks next month!  Reese’s peanut butter cups and Smarties.  Very Christmasy.

Anyway, this weekend, neighbors who are even mildly curious about our lifestyle would have seen Chris and I making a homemade insulating wall in the side yard for the root cellar, on account of all our water pipes sort of just hang out there.  Last year, on our third day in the new house, they all froze, and we had to have a plumber come and sort it out.  He told us to get a space heater for the space, and we did, but the root cellar is a big, big place, so we built a kid’s fort out of packing boxes so that the thing wouldn’t be running 24-7. 

You know those little electric cords you are supposed to wrap around your pipes to keep them from freezing?  They don’t work in our root cellar.

Anyway, with the wet spring and so on, all the packing boxes moldered, and thus it was that we built our own insulatingwall out of plastic sheets stuffed with newspapers (can you guess which newspaper I used?) to keep the root cellar as warm as humanly possible.

Rudie the Dog was very upset with us for leaving her in the house when we went to pick up newspapers from the recycling bin, and while we were gone, she ripped open the packages of weatherstripping we bought at Roger’s.  So she got a time-out in her crate while we built the wall.

Naturally, all the newspaper fell to the bottom of the insulating wall.  We will probably reconsider our options for next year, but we had neither the time nor the money - nor the inclination, for that matter - to invest in insulation before we have our energy audit.  Then, I imagine, insulation will be at the top of our wish lists for years to come. 

So we got some more boxes and packed them around the insulating wall, and we will hope for the best.

And hope the auditors don’t laugh their heads off when they see it early next month.

In the meantime, we got the bad news that oil for our highly inefficient oil boiler will be over $3 a gallon this year, so we are practising some good old-fashioned New Englander thrift, and wearing our long underwear under our clothes and fleece jackets over our clothes and fluffy socks and slippers when we’re in the house.  We confine our activities to one or two rooms, where all the animals can also be found. 

We moved Paco the Parrot into the living room, dragged out the little electric space heater, and hunker down while the rest of the house limps along at 55 degrees.  During the day, we heat the house up good before we leave, and it usually stays warm enough for the animals until someone shows up.  And at night we’re not above hot water bottles and many, many blankets.  And cats and dogs at our feet.

So now we have to finish the weatherstripping and so on and start the long, long process of turning this old house into This Old Green House, while ironically avoiding the Greenhouse Effect outside. 

Hey, we can do this.  But can we do it in our lifetime? And do we have that long?