Is lavatory any better than saying TOILET?
the basement is raining loo water
I never know how to talk about my wedding anniversary. Eric isn't here so it's not our twenty-third wedding anniversary. But it's still twenty-three years since I married him; something I'd do all over again if I had the DeLoran handy.
It was yesterday anyway, so I don't know why I'm all hung up on semantics.
The day we got married, September 1st, 2000, was a Friday. Our anniversary only fell on a Friday two more times while Eric was alive: 2006 and 2017. Yesterday was the third time. It would have made it easier to get away for the weekend, what with school starting and all. Kind of a weird version of grief math, but it made my day extra melancholy.
I was working in the office when I heard the older boys get home from mowing lawns. My oldest, Jake, sat in the front room reading for a while before he hollered, "Mom, why do I hear water in the vents?"
My heart sunk. Since Eric died, we've had two catastrophic basement floods. I jumped up and he met me in the hall where we were greeted by a lot of water flowing from the upstairs bathroom.
The toilet in there has been giving us a lot of trouble and as ever, it is difficult to get a plumber out. My friend Kat thought she could help me change something in the tank to stop it running all the time, but we hadn't coordinated on that yet.
After shutting off the water, I sent Jake downstairs to see if the water was coming through the ceiling yet, and sure enough, it was.
The rest of the day was spent trying to save the brand new carpet (replaced after the last flood), pulling down soggy drywall from the ceiling, and trying to figure out whether or not we were dealing with a clog, another sand problem courtesy our well, or a more badly broken toilet than we'd previously realized.
House problems are never fun, but house problems without Eric make me want to fling myself off a building. It was hard not to remember how quickly he would have selected the right tools to pull down drywall... or (more likely) how quickly he would have fixed or replaced the problematic potty, saving us from a flood in the first place.
Jake is normally plagued with anxiety and worry, particularly about germs, but I was so impressed with the way he just rolled up his sleeves and got to work, all while toilet water continued to rain in the basement for a couple of hours.
None of us are as skilled as Eric would have been, but neither of us swore as much either (haha, dead dad humor). We were less elegant about it, but we got a lot done and as Jake kept cheerfully reminding us, this was nothing compared to the previous two floods that required restoration companies, new carpet, walls, and baseboards.
True.
Everyone helped and Eric would have been so proud of his kids. By the time we were going to bed, the section of damaged ceiling had been pulled out, we were down to one bowl under a last, persistent drip, the kids had hauled out all the debris, towels were in the washing machine, fans were running, and I was able to shampoo the sections of carpet that had gotten wet before we'd managed to get the plastic sheeting down.
If you don't have basements where you live, they are a mixed bag for us. It doubles the size of your house (as my friend Heather from Texas exclaimed when she came to visit, "You've got a whole other house down here!), but as they are underground, they are prone to flooding and damp. (Though never, in my 43 years of living with basements before Eric died had I ever experienced floods or damp, then THREE floods after. Super.)
The water from the toilet upstairs flooded the bathroom, the hall, and ran down a floor vent, into the HVAC system in the soffit downstairs, leaked out of the non-waterproof metal channels, and soaked the drywall ceiling. Paint bulged, mud & taping failed, and that soffit rained until we got all the drywall off so it could flow more freely and begin drying out.
The water is still turned off on the toilet; but we need to figure that out next. What a fun newsletter! How many times can I type toilet? Toilet! Toilet! TOILET!
Anyway, kids left to pick up dinner for us and came home with roses and chocolate for me, because an anniversary is still an anniversary even if your husband is dead and toilet (TOILET!) water has flooded your basement.
Cheers, Eric. The moonrise last night was pretty, even if my phone cannot take decent photos of anything lunar.
