I was at my Mom and Dad's house last Sunday, installing a printer driver on her computer, when the call came. Cathy had gone to the store, leaving me and Mikey and Hannah over at Mom & Dad's so I could fix up her computer, and she had just gotten home. "Come home!" she said, and I could hear the stress in her voice. "There's a flood in the garage, and water is spraying everywhere!"
Cathy has been known, from time to time, to overreact to water in the garage; one time the "flood" she reported wasn't enough water to quench a grown-up's thirst on a hot day. But I could tell she was totally freaking out this time, so I hurried as quickly as I could. Turns out, her stress was justified. When I got there I looked through the window into the garage to see a vertical slot in the wall above the clothes washer, and water was indeed spraying out of it at an alarming rate. There was so much water it was running down the driveway, freezing in place and making the driveway even more treacherous than it already was! After the snow on Christmas Eve, our time above freezing had been limited, so one of the pipes that supplied water to the laundry had frozen and broken. The water was shooting out of it with so much force that it had drilled a hole in the sheet rock and it actually was spraying out into the garage.
In our nine years of living in this house, our garage has only flooded one time before. A year or so ago, it rained and rained for several weeks straight, and the water table was so high that we got some water in the garage. That was NOTHING compared to this. We shut off the water at the street (Dad had come with me) and surveyed the damage. Our garage is a good inch lower than the driveway, so you can imagine if the water was draining off onto the driveway... it was pretty deep! When I stepped down into it wearing my boots, it covered the toes. I grabbed my snow shovel, which was right near the side door of the garage, and started shoveling out water; I figured it was the quickest way to get a bunch of water out of there. It actually worked fairly well; I got most of the water out in oh, maybe an hour or so.
I had learned some things in that last flood, and the main something I had learned was this: wet cardboard must be gotten rid of as immediately as possible. This is because cardboard, left wet on concrete for a week or so, becomes very slimy and disgusting, and anything that is inside that cardboard mildews and has to be thrown away. So once I had the water under control, I started trying to get things out of the wet boxes and get them out of the garage. Knowing that pipes were likely breaking all over town, I called a friend of ours who is a contractor, remodeling houses for a big part of his livelihood. I needed to get the pipe fixed as soon as possible... I couldn't afford to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday for a plumber while my family lived in a house with no water!
Dwayne answered the phone with a groggy voice. He had spent the weekend on Guard duty, and he had been taking a nap. I told him basically what was going on, and he came over right away. Long story short, he wasn't able to fix the problem that day (although he tried) because he didn't have the part he needed, but when the supply store opened the next day, he went out and got the part he needed, and we were fine before noon on Monday. It's awesome to have friends who are so competent at what they do, and so willing to help out a friend in dire straits! He is definitely getting a meal out with us in the near future!
The one thing that really differentiated this flood from the last one was that this was clean water, not muddy rainwater that had seeped in from outside. Most of our stuff was also already up off the ground from that former episode, too, so although I threw out a lot of cardboard and set a lot of stuff out to dry, not very much of any consequence got thrown away (in fact, a lot of stuff that I did throw away wasn't as much water-damaged as just needed to go anyway). It was kind of like spring cleaning in January! And I did find some old pictures from several different eras of my life, Cathy's life, and our life together, and I got to take inventory of all the CDs full of pictures that were out there. I found some pictures from the wedding that originally brought me, Kevin and Candi (and Littlefoot) to Tulsa, and some even older pictures of me from high school. I found a Goodbye card that my youth group gave me when I was leaving Shreveport to go to college at ORU. I found a report Cathy wrote on marriage for a class when she was about 17 (VERY interesting reading!) and a bunch of bubble-gum cards with pictures from Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Bogus Journey. It was fun to experience and share some of those things again!
One week later, there are still some things out there that are damp. Some of the cardboard is still outside; the garbage collection will only take so much at once. But things are basically back to normal; the garage is much clearer; and I'm committed, once it warms up, to doing a real spring cleaning. This is a great excuse to simplify and remove some of the junk from our life!
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