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Let me tell you two stories.
In one story I have a week of vacation planned with someone very important to me: Josh. I see him in person very seldom. We're going to do something very important to me, planting this year's garden. The spring is early this year and so I wait to plant my garden until he'll be here, but that puts me behind the season. By the time he gets here the soil is dead dry, hard to till, and a couple days before he gets here my basement starts flooding whenever I run the water. I can't even get a plumber to show up until Josh is actually here.
So in the end of this story not only do I miss planting things with Josh, but I spend the whole vacation with him managing the plumber and managing the animals with very little water and at some points no working water in the house or even working toilets. In the middle of this we're doing a pig butcher and a bunch of chicks are hatching: hatching into a completely chaotic space with no real room for the brooder. With no water. We don't get to have showers, the plumber finishes the evening before Josh leaves, nothing gets planted, the field isn't even fully tilled, and the vacation is both not relaxing and doesn't leave a lot of time for connection since we're both managing all the stuff. It will also probably cost more than I have left on my credit card, and so I'm not even sure what will happen there but paying it off at credit card interest rates will suck even if I can squeeze it on there. I certainly don't have money to replace the shower that's been taken out, so I'm down a bathroom and I get to spend my summer re-insulating and drywalling a couple rooms in my house. Fun.
Ok. That's one story.
In the next story it's an early spring. The soil will be warmer than it was last year when I go to plant, so things should move fast when I get my seeds in the ground. Josh has come up to plant and gets some of the fields tilled, but my waterline has broken and starts flooding the basement so we need to switch activities. Thank goodness Josh is here because he's my low-water camping buddy so he's pretty unphased by living in a house without much plumbing for a couple days, and he's also a project management engineer so when "flooding basement" turns into "replace waterline, some of the foundation, and some of the sewer" he's able to understand what's going on, put the decisions into clear terms and help me make them, and communicate/oversee the plumber and excavator that needs to dig up my waterline clear back to my well. I don't know what I would have done without his skill and support, and he only makes it up here twice a year or so. It's such luck that he's here. That's good because we also have a butchering happening during all this, but luckily I had booked the processor for this one so all we had to do was drive the carcasses down and hand them off.
Throughout all of this I have ducks and geese hatching. I'd forgotten how much I like them: incubator-hatched geese that you sing to will imprint on your voice, they're not fearful and they're not taught by their parents to be fearful so they love cuddles and being nibbled on the backs of the neck with fingers. In the few moments I get to sit down my cats jump onto me to give me lots of love.
Since the excavator is here anyhow he can run up to the field and dig holes quick for my apple trees, so I'll get to spend a day or two less doing that. And that's good, because the apple trees have just arrived, bareroot, and need to go in the ground immediately.
I get to have a good look at the inside of Threshold, see where things come and go from the well, replace some concrete where unbeknownst to me the water had undermined it and crumbled it soft, and pull the waterline into the house instead of running it through the wall so it's much less likely to freeze in future. This means my bathroom needs to be demolished, but the shower there was problematic for a number of reasons, and a proper drain for it can be installed now. I can't afford to reinstall the shower yet, but when I can I won't have to use the plunger on it to make it drain. I put flagging tape in the trench above the waterline so it won't be harmed in the future.
And while all this is happening, we have frost! If I'd planted my tomatoes early they might well have been frost-burned, but as it is I only lost a couple. With the water back on I have water pressure like I haven't had in years -- I guess mud was coming in through the crack in the waterline and messing up the pressure -- so I'll be able to water as I plant.
I'm deeply agnostic about a lot of things, but I like the idea that my home protects me. She kept me from planting the garden too early, and made sure in a way I couldn't ignore that my water would be both sufficient to run the garden and fixed long-term. I wasn't irritated with any of this, and I'm maybe a little less afraid of the money aspect than I have been in the past: some friends have helped me out with past house emergencies, and so I'm not as afraid that I'll have to sell the house to deal with this as I might normally be.
And, as if by magic, I'd just got into clay and was watching videos on how to find wild clay with Josh the day before the excavator came. Under the foundation the excavator pulled up chunks of sticky, squishy clay, very pure seeming, and I pulled some chunks out. A pot made of clay from my home's foundation, fired in the yard, feels like very powerful magic indeed.
My garden will be in at the same time as last year but with lots of water and warm soil it should grow nice and fast.
And I have both plentiful lovely water and a renewed appreciation for that bounty.
In one story I have a week of vacation planned with someone very important to me: Josh. I see him in person very seldom. We're going to do something very important to me, planting this year's garden. The spring is early this year and so I wait to plant my garden until he'll be here, but that puts me behind the season. By the time he gets here the soil is dead dry, hard to till, and a couple days before he gets here my basement starts flooding whenever I run the water. I can't even get a plumber to show up until Josh is actually here.
So in the end of this story not only do I miss planting things with Josh, but I spend the whole vacation with him managing the plumber and managing the animals with very little water and at some points no working water in the house or even working toilets. In the middle of this we're doing a pig butcher and a bunch of chicks are hatching: hatching into a completely chaotic space with no real room for the brooder. With no water. We don't get to have showers, the plumber finishes the evening before Josh leaves, nothing gets planted, the field isn't even fully tilled, and the vacation is both not relaxing and doesn't leave a lot of time for connection since we're both managing all the stuff. It will also probably cost more than I have left on my credit card, and so I'm not even sure what will happen there but paying it off at credit card interest rates will suck even if I can squeeze it on there. I certainly don't have money to replace the shower that's been taken out, so I'm down a bathroom and I get to spend my summer re-insulating and drywalling a couple rooms in my house. Fun.
Ok. That's one story.
In the next story it's an early spring. The soil will be warmer than it was last year when I go to plant, so things should move fast when I get my seeds in the ground. Josh has come up to plant and gets some of the fields tilled, but my waterline has broken and starts flooding the basement so we need to switch activities. Thank goodness Josh is here because he's my low-water camping buddy so he's pretty unphased by living in a house without much plumbing for a couple days, and he's also a project management engineer so when "flooding basement" turns into "replace waterline, some of the foundation, and some of the sewer" he's able to understand what's going on, put the decisions into clear terms and help me make them, and communicate/oversee the plumber and excavator that needs to dig up my waterline clear back to my well. I don't know what I would have done without his skill and support, and he only makes it up here twice a year or so. It's such luck that he's here. That's good because we also have a butchering happening during all this, but luckily I had booked the processor for this one so all we had to do was drive the carcasses down and hand them off.
Throughout all of this I have ducks and geese hatching. I'd forgotten how much I like them: incubator-hatched geese that you sing to will imprint on your voice, they're not fearful and they're not taught by their parents to be fearful so they love cuddles and being nibbled on the backs of the neck with fingers. In the few moments I get to sit down my cats jump onto me to give me lots of love.
Since the excavator is here anyhow he can run up to the field and dig holes quick for my apple trees, so I'll get to spend a day or two less doing that. And that's good, because the apple trees have just arrived, bareroot, and need to go in the ground immediately.
I get to have a good look at the inside of Threshold, see where things come and go from the well, replace some concrete where unbeknownst to me the water had undermined it and crumbled it soft, and pull the waterline into the house instead of running it through the wall so it's much less likely to freeze in future. This means my bathroom needs to be demolished, but the shower there was problematic for a number of reasons, and a proper drain for it can be installed now. I can't afford to reinstall the shower yet, but when I can I won't have to use the plunger on it to make it drain. I put flagging tape in the trench above the waterline so it won't be harmed in the future.
And while all this is happening, we have frost! If I'd planted my tomatoes early they might well have been frost-burned, but as it is I only lost a couple. With the water back on I have water pressure like I haven't had in years -- I guess mud was coming in through the crack in the waterline and messing up the pressure -- so I'll be able to water as I plant.
I'm deeply agnostic about a lot of things, but I like the idea that my home protects me. She kept me from planting the garden too early, and made sure in a way I couldn't ignore that my water would be both sufficient to run the garden and fixed long-term. I wasn't irritated with any of this, and I'm maybe a little less afraid of the money aspect than I have been in the past: some friends have helped me out with past house emergencies, and so I'm not as afraid that I'll have to sell the house to deal with this as I might normally be.
And, as if by magic, I'd just got into clay and was watching videos on how to find wild clay with Josh the day before the excavator came. Under the foundation the excavator pulled up chunks of sticky, squishy clay, very pure seeming, and I pulled some chunks out. A pot made of clay from my home's foundation, fired in the yard, feels like very powerful magic indeed.
My garden will be in at the same time as last year but with lots of water and warm soil it should grow nice and fast.
And I have both plentiful lovely water and a renewed appreciation for that bounty.
