Life Beneath the Baseboard

Last summer, during the pandemic, I was searching for things to do and decided to clean up my makeup station. I call it a station because it’s kind of a rest area where I change myself from Crypt Keeper into Passable. At any rate, while I was cleaning, I dropped a makeup sponge behind my station and had to move the thing away from the wall. When I did, a lizard ran out from under the desk and under the baseboard. After I finished screaming, I realized I had a dilemma, namely how to get the lizard out. It took me a hot minute, but I realized I was never gonna get that lizard out of there because they absolutely terrified me. I had already envisioned that monster from the pit of hell was probably gonna run across my face in the middle of the night and/or crawl in my mouth while I was snoring. The lizard had to die. It took me a hot minute, but I disposed of the lizard. Not to go into too much detail, but it involved a hammer and a few sharp raps to the baseboard. Bye, bye lizard. For all you lizard lovers out there, please do not judge. I have had a total of FIVE lizard encounters in my life, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s FIVE too many!

Last week, while I was at my doctor, I was waiting my the room for the doctor to make an appearance and I happened to glance down at the baseboard, because I saw movement out of the corner of my eye. I fully expected to see the reincarnation of the lizard coming back to haunt me, but no….it was a small spider that crawled out from the top of the baseboard and up the wall. Since I have no strong feelings one way or the other about spiders, I left it alone as it meandered up the wall and then back down into the baseboard. I thought about telling the doctor, but decided against it, mainly because I was still preoccupied by a potential lizard haunting, and because of the thought that struck me when this happened—there is life beneath the baseboards of, not only our homes, but of our minds.

Yes, I feely admit that I my mind works in strange and mysterious ways. But aren’t baseboards strange and mysterious things? They serve no purpose other than to conceal where the floor and walls meet. They look nice, but underneath lurks all manner of lizards and spiders. In short, they conceal things we don’t want to know about. No one wants to think about where the walls meet the floors. And I don’t even want to get started on crown moulding…

What is your baseboard? What does it conceal? Is it something you need to look beneath? Or is it something better left undisturbed? Do we need to knock the mold off the dark recesses of our past? Usually what hides beneath is something we don’t want to deal with. But what started out as a small lizard can turn into a dragon if we don’t confront it. I’m not saying we need to slay the dragon every day, but once we put it to rest, we need to let it die a quiet death. Graveyards were built to house the dead, but the living are the ones who visit. But at some point, the living LEAVE the cemetery and go about their daily lives.

Don’t let the baseboards get you down. We all have them. We all have things buried in our minds that we just don’t relish looking under. It’s a fate common to humans. But, unlike the cemetery, once we deal with it, bury it and leave it, there is little to no reason to visit it again, unless it is as a reminder of how far we’ve come, and the goodness of God to bring us where we are today. You see, God has looked under the baseboard and He didn’t recoil with horror of what He saw there. No stranger to lizard, spider, and even dragon slaying, is He. He has placed His foot on the head of the enemy and He has won, and so have we.

What we do with our lives and how we progress has everything to do with how we clean our baseboards. The baseboards in my home thrive on sheer neglect, because I clean them seldom. But our minds…Ah, that’s another thing altogether. It gets dark in there frequently, but we know how to turn on the Light.

God bless you, dear friends!