The Root Cellar

Lyrics

The air grows colder by degrees. A different kind of silence down here. The house stops pretending.

Past the ghost-gleam of silver in the Butler's Pantry, I take the back stair. Always the back stair. The scent of lye and steam from the Laundry fades behind me. A choice here, at the landing. To the left, the Furnace Corridor breathes its dry violence, a fever I will not visit. So I turn right, toward the cold. Toward the patient dark. The key is iron and it feels like a root in my hand. It knows this lock.

And here it is. The promise we made to August. The deep, slow breath of things asleep. Potatoes in their bins, dreaming of soil. The shy carrots, the bleeding hearts of beets. This is the calendar of the earth, written in rows. A library of hunger held at bay. Every jar a word, every shelf a line in a prayer against the frost.

The floor is packed earth, cool through my shoes. Overhead, a single pipe weeps its slow time. The silver pinprick of that sound lands cold on my skin. This is the only clock that matters. It measures the life of apples stored since 1929, their skins gone soft, their perfume a memory of sun. It marks the long wait of the turnip bin, its wood warped, the one nail hole in its lid empty, a waiting mouth.

I remember her hands setting these jars down, or I remember the story of those hands. The difference is a fine dust I can’t wipe away. I run a finger over a label: ‘Peaches, 1954’. The ink is faded, but the glass beneath it is not cold. It holds the warmth of a forgotten summer afternoon. And inside one bin, beneath the burlap, lies a single, perfect potato. And carved into its skin is a map of this room, a cellar within the cellar, impossibly small and complete.

I leave them to their patient sleep. The cold, the dark, the promise. The drip continues, counting. Always counting.