Tales from Goshen: March 2011

The Water Curse

Life 8:00 AM

While there are some lovely family...shall we say, "auras", that have been passed down from my parents to their offspring, there is one notable curse that is finding its way from parent to child.

And I'll translate that gobbledy-gook by saying that there is a sleep spell on our houses (at least on my parents house and my own) which makes kids take extraordinarily long naps and sleep late in the mornings. This is obviously a blessing. A wonderful thing.

And there is a water curse that plagues us like the locust and frogs. This curse began years ago at my parent's house. I remember various episodes of the downstairs flooding following hard rains. Many many hours (not to mention dollars) were spent shop-vac'ing water out of the downstairs, ripping up carpet and installing fans strategically to dry the place out. Even after most of the water flow was diverted through the installation of a French drain, the curse just found its way around that.

I remember flying back from Florida one year, a few days ahead of my parents, and walking down the stairs. The moment my foot touched off the stairs onto the carpet, there was a horribly familiar SQUISH. In horror, I frantically called my parents who quickly rallied the troops (friends and water-removal people) to begin addressing the problem. Turns out the water heater had sprung a leak and was systematically filling and emptying all over the downstairs. No telling how long it had been doing that before I discovered it.

There have been other incidents where a water leak developed between a wall and it sounded like a geyser hitting the walls. This went on for days before the problem was identified and fixed.

Refrigerators have broken and poured water through the first floor down to the second floor...sheetrock just dripping from the ceiling. And even most recently, water has been streaming into my parents house via the roof connecting point of an addition to the house. Let's just say that at some point, my parents gravely offended the water fairies and justice has not yet been served.

And this curse, much like that affecting the Kennedy's, touches us kids.

Zach and Anna have had horrific, expensive water issues in their new house. They had to divert water around their house to keep their downstairs from flooding as well. And Josh and Lauren have had numerous water issues relating to pipes and yes, their downstairs flooding. They're currently dealing with old, non-existent sewer pipes and apparently are not able to flush toilet paper down the toilets! Fun stuff!

After Josh recently recounted his and Lauren's most recent tale of woe, Josh commented, you must be immune to this now, having married out. I kept silent. Not sure about this at all.

Josh was proven dead wrong when Kyle and I awoke the next morning to a huge water stain on our foyer ceiling and a puddle of water on the hardwood floors. There is a mysterious leak from the vicinity of our bathtub that we have hacked into our ceiling to investigate.