February 1, 2007 ~ A Metaphor for January
Thursday.
This month, I am going to take a picture every day for the "in the life" WordGoddess collaboration. There are eleven entries in this sequence. You can page through the "In the Life" entries by clicking "next" at the bottom of each entry this month through to the 28th. Today's picture, unfortunately, was too disgusting to slap you in the face with first thing when this entry loaded, so, some lead-in...
2007, thus far, has been a massive disappointment of a year.
It started off with my departure from Oregon, leaving behind so many people I love, and of course those awful flights.
Grove's first two illnesses followed, and the parental right of passage of being vomited upon. Repeatedly.
My own two sicknesses accompanied Grove's, and Morgan managed to get sick four times in four weeks. At the third week, he joked that he must have accidentally signed the family up for the "Virus of the Week" club, but by the fourth week it wasn't so funny.
And then two of my friends got into a massive fight, which is turning out to be a permanent schism, which I am unfortunately in the middle of.
And then Morgan got a diagnosis for a condition that we were half expecting but which means forty bucks that we don't have every month for a prescription.
And then my cousin died. In a car accident. He was only twenty-one. As always, I wanted very badly to be among others who knew him in grieving, but I'm 3,000 miles away. I'm going to miss his memorial. And sending a card to my aunt and uncle feels like such a hugely inadequate gesture when set against their massive wall of loss, which I can hardly imagine.
As all of these things piled up, the little things that I would normally brush off started to wriggle in through the chinks in my armor. Grove's sleep schedule continuing to be massively messed up from the jetlag. Some hiker throwing a bunch of dog poop in our trashcan (if you're going to bother to pick it up, why the hell would you throw it in SOMEONE ELSE'S trash??). The gas bill being more than we could pay. Grove trying to transition to one nap a day (and being incredibly cranky about it). Having to cancel a visit with friends. The frame of our futon bed breaking with a loud crack, leaving a large dip in the middle of the mattress (which we still need to try to fix).
And then, THEN. Then something happened which was a perfect metaphor for the entire month.
On Tuesday night, I was taking a shower, and I heard the toilet start to... bubble. Hmm... that's odd. And I glanced down and realized that water was starting to pool in the tub below me. Uh oh. As I rinsed my hair, globs of brown gunk started to come up the drain like something out of a horror movie. I shut off the shower and balanced on the edge of the tub, scrubbing my feet thoroughly while Morgan ran around the house panicking. The other toilet was bubbling too. I felt a hovering sense of dread, an overwhelming assurance that this was about to get a lot worse.
The house has had sewer problems since we moved in, and I always had the sense that it was going to build to some crisis, but the plumbers just kept telling us, "Oh, pour some liquid plumber down it," which we hated using, but living in a rental, we had little choice.
We tried plunging the drains, but that just made sewage come up other drains. By this time it was midnight, no one could be called, so we went to bed hoping that the excess water and the backwashed sewage would slowly drain back down in the night. (It did).
Morgan tried to call the campus plumbing crew first thing in the morning yesterday, but he couldn't get past the front desk of facilities management. "I'm sorry, you'll have to file a work order, and they'll get back to you as soon as they can." She typed the information into her computer.
I tried to use the drains as little as possible throughout the day, flushing a toilet only once, washing my hands as little as possible, and fixing something simple for lunch. The drains gurgled ominously, and occasional backwash would come up into the tub. We heard nothing all day.
This morning, Morgan called again and insisted on talking directly with the plumbing supervisor, and actually got him. He agreed that it was serious, agreed that there was something blocking the sewer line between our house and the street, agreed that something needed to be done immediately. And then he said, "but we can't do anything today because of the weather. Try not to use the plumbing in your house too much."
I looked outside at the utter lack of any sort of weather. Right. Great. I cursed the local news stations for their hysterical "WINTER STORM!!" predictions that had been utterly untrue, but had caused everyone to panic anyway. (Later in the day, we got a few flurries that quickly melted and then turned into rain). We were coming up on a weekend, and snow was forecast for tomorrow, too. But they couldn't do anything now before the bad weather actually hit?
I was out of diapers for Grove, so I had to do a load of laundry. I set the washer to "extra small" as always, crossed my fingers, and started it. An hour later, both toilets looked like this:
...and the one in the master bathroom had overflowed onto the floor. The bathtub had been plugged, but the overflow drain looked like the maw of some putrid swamp monster, black sewage seeping out in streams. The house smelled foul. I called Morgan. "Hey... we're coming to your office. The house is a public health hazard. I'm putting the dogs out in the pen." I packed a diaper bag with food and toys and clothes for Grove and we went across campus.
Meanwhile, Morgan, horrified by my descriptions, tried to call plumbing again, but he got answering machines at every number. He learned that all of facilities management had been released so that they could "get home before the weather turned bad" despite the fact that the rest of the college was still in operation.
I sat on the floor with Grove while Morgan called human resources (who act as landlords for staff living in campus housing), then the business department. He politely explained the situation, and that we could not stay in our house like this overnight, it would just take a short call to a contractor, could we please be authorized to do that? They'd call him back.
We ate lunch at the cheap Mexican place down the street and tried to figure out how we could possibly afford a hotel. We wondered what we could do with the dogs. Leave them in the pen? But their water would freeze overnight, and Rose would probably howl all night and wake the neighbors.
Thankfully, the business office called back and let us know that a plumbing contractor had been called and would be at the house by that evening. But that meant that Grove and I would have to stay at the putrid-smelling house all afternoon waiting for them to show. Ugh.
Thankfully, the man who came was able to blade the line and get rid of our clog. We spent the evening cleaning up most of the mess, though the smell still lingers, as do the rest of January's unfortunate events.
May February be a better month.
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