Of Water and Loss
It wasn't a good night.
After a long day at work, I arrived home Monday at 7 p.m. Wearily, I lugged my briefcase and coffee mug in from the car and entered my downstairs family room. As I closed the garage door behind me and rounded the stairs to head up to the kitchen, I heard an odd sound. A odd hissing sound.
I traced the unfamiliar sound to the furnace room where my worst fear was realized. As I pushed open the door, an otherwise beautiful spray of water, hot water, mind you, was leaping forth from the top of my hot water heater. Amid my shock at the utter catastrophe of what I was seeing, I noticed that items I'd stored in the furnace room were floating on several inches of water which covered the floor.
Quickly, I shrieked to my family - they were somewhere in the house, weren't they? - and they all came flying down the stairs to see why I was bellowing. Even our golden retriever Brooksie could tell by the tone of my voice that something serious was up.
We quickly went to work, trying to remember how to shut the water off - which damn valve was it? - while reaching to retrieve the floating objects leisurely riding the waves of warm water lapping at our feet.
I frantically called the plumber and thought how calm the answering service operator sounded. She must be used to receiving these types of panicked calls from homeowners. Must be like a dispatcher on an emergency line who needs to quickly ascertain the who/what/where/when/how and why from an otherwise befuddled, flustered caller.
She took my message and within minutes, well, several actually, the plumber called back. He had just knocked off from work himself, he told me, and did I really think he needed to come out? "Yes," I responded, I believe with a hiss through clenched teeth. "I'm standing in ankle-deep water. Yes, you need to come out. NOW."
The plumber came and replaced the faulty valve that had given way, installing a new one and soldering fixtures into place. We used our wet-dry vacuum to suck up as much of the water as we could and turned on some fans to begin the drying-out process. The plumber left around 10:30 p.m. and it was then, after the kids were settled into their beds, that I began to take stock.
And that's when I got a sense of what the survivors of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita must really be going through.
I've never lived through the loss of a home and certainly hope I never do. After my hot water disaster, however, as I began to go through the soggy boxes of items that we'd rescued from our mini-flood, I began to sense the crushing loss of personal history that people in Louisiana and elsewhere are enduring.
Pictures of my children taken when they were babies were soaked and stuck together. These were photos taken in the days before digital cameras and I'd always planned to get the photos into albums and put the negatives away for safekeeping. Boots, shoes, ski paraphernalia, vacuum attachments, pillows, papers, old newspapers and more were all soaked through and already beginning to disintegrate.
When I came upon the short essay I'd written in the fifth-grade about a visit with my great-aunt, Lucy Caroline Talbot, which she'd framed in a small, inexpensive gold frame that had endured in my family through the years, my heart broke. The yellowed piece of lined paper on which I'd described my day with her and how I hoped "to see her again soon," had survived safely for years in her house, displayed prominently on a table in her front parlor. After she died, it was taken for safekeeping by my parents who later gave it to me. And I'd had it, safely, for over 17 years.
The irony of the little framed essay was that my daughter, herself now in fifth-grade, had a similar assignment recently. She wrote about seeing her grandparents in Maine and what a fun time she had spent with them. She added that she hoped she'd "visit them again soon." I'd made a copy of her essay and sent it to my parents and I showed her my essay about my great-Aunt Lucy.
Now, after my furnace room flood, that bit of tangible, scribbled history was gone, never to be recaptured, save in my memory.
My heart goes out to all those who have been traumatized by the recent hurricanes and who have lost items that can never be replaced. If they were fortunate enough to be left with their lives and those of their loved ones intact, yes, their houses and belongings can be replaced.
But they will need to mourn the vast and profound losses of all those small and peculiar items that helped define their lives and reminded them of who they are. And that's something no fund-raiser or benefit, however well intended, can do. Godspeed to them all as their healing continues.
Carol Brooks Ball is the Senior Editor of the Melrose Free Press.
