I arrived home from a road trip to a flooded basement. Luckily my spouse had been home at the time it flooded and so discovered it only a couple hours after two feet of water had entered, and was able to grab whatever he could to bring it to higher ground. But my music room was in the basement, and almost everything ended up under water. We’ve had floods before, from all sorts of causes: a burst (frozen) pipe, a tree growing through our sewer line (that one was an adventure), and plain old water incursion. But we’ve taken steps to address all the causes of these, including putting in a fancy new drainage and sump pump system. And so it felt safe to rebuild and re-install my music room in one of the finished basement rooms. It’s great to have a music room down there; I can make lots of noise without bothering anyone else in our unit (we live in a multi-unit house) or the rest of the building. And I can have a space where I can keep everything I would want for music within reach. And so I made the music room into a real sanctuary, with a nice rug and a comfy chair, and all the instruments and music books I’ve accumulated over the years. The instruments were off the ground, but two feet of water is a lot, and many of them got waterlogged. Four of them are damaged probably beyond repair, including both travel guitars. The good news is that my good guitar was on the road with me, so it was out of harm’s way. What was also lost in the flood was every single music book I’ve accumulated over my many decades as a musician. It’s funny – I play by ear (except piano, and all my piano music drowned, too), so you wouldn’t think I’d have that many music books. But every instrument I play I taught myself, initially from music books, including my very first Mel Bay Teach Yourself Guitar book that was among the casualties. And somehow over time I’d acquired an awful lot of song books and chord books and information books. None of them survived. The first few days were a flurry of activity – doing what we could to salvage the things that were salvageable, working with the water removal disaster team, filing insurance claims (insurance paid a bit, but because of a flood exclusion, very little compared to what we lost), doing a lot of cleaning, hauling things to the dump. Once we got past that stage, I got a little despondent. Don’t get me wrong – nothing that I lost was anything that I needed, and I’m beyond grateful that my good guitar wasn’t even in the house. When I went through my drowned music books none of them (except for the three I put in the freezer in an effort to save, because they had huge sentimental value) individually mattered that much to me; I can’t see going through an effort to replace the specific volumes that were destroyed; I didn’t even bother to make a record of them. The same thing is true of the instruments – it’s inconvenient to no longer have a travel guitar (especially as I’m about to leave for Taiwan), but I didn’t have a sentimental attachment to either of the ones that were destroyed. The inlaid mandolin I had was gorgeous, but heavy, so I didn’t play it that often. The tiple was cool (and a collector’s item), but it’s not an instrument I bring out in public. But it’s the bigger picture – the fact that none of those books are there to consult when I’m in the middle of a songwriting challenge and want an inspiration for a traditional tune to rewrite, or to consult about how to play some odd chord on the dulcimer or to help me figure out how to tune into a new mode on the (still slightly soggy but probably intact) banjo. And, most important, that my music room isn’t there any more. I don’t have a space to go to (or a chair to sit in – that also didn’t make it) to write music or practice playing. My remaining instruments are scattered in odd places around our household at this point; I’m afraid of taking them back downstairs until I am reassured that we’ve done something to make it extremely unlikely that the basement will flood again. And since we were pretty sure we’d done that the last time around, I have no idea what, if anything, we can do that will get me a music room again.