heed the drip

It’s not the first time we’ve had furniture in the yard. And please help me, it probably will not be the last. Last time it was more of an “out with the old” maneuver, and the out part required immediate action. This time was less of a decorating choice and more of a disaster. But what difference does it make, really, when the bottom line is furniture on your lawn?

It all started on Sunday morning, the one lovely morning of the week when I don’t rush off to work or the gym right away. My girl and I have the habit of hanging out in my bed watching TLC until one of us breaks. She always breaks first, girlfriend’s gotta eat. This past Sunday as my girl came barreling down the hall to join me, I thought I heard my husband say: “Tell mom that she looks breathteeking.” But that didn’t quite make sense, so I figured he must have said “Tell mom that the titanic is seenking” or maybe “Tell mom that the potter seating is tweeenkling” or something and it seemed obvious that he was drunk and/or addled so I did what any normal person would do at such a time, I turned up the volume on Say Yes to the Dress and lifted up a corner of the blankies for my girl to climb in.

That evil girl. She looked me right in the eye and said: “Dad said to tell you that the water heater is leaking.”

And there it was, the kind of sentence that sucks the life right out of your easy breezy morning, and oh dear God WHY DOES THE PLUMBING ALWAYS CRASH ON WEEKENDS AND HOLIDAYS?

We managed to convince ourselves that it could wait a few days, we made a few calls and had a sense about how much the damage would be, spent a few sad moments lamenting the good times that this insulting amount of hard earned money would not buy, then we carried on with our day.

When we eventually called that day done, we thought to shut off the water supply to our house, just in case. And that is why we had a 40 gallon flood instead of a 40 hundred gallon flood, which is so fortunate and fortuitous and lucky and grand, and also why the furniture is in the yard.    

If there is there a moral to this story, it is to heed the drip.