Lucky Me.

 

Lucky me.

It only cost $25 this time. And three hours of my life I won’t get back.

Every spring, the house reminds me who’s boss.

A new broken pipe. Or two. Sometimes more. Always outdoors.

The indoor plumbing is mostly civil.

The yard, though?

It’s a calamitous, confounding, concatenation of shallow-buried pipes laid like a drunken game of Tetris over decades.

The frost heaves the ground.

The ground breaks the pipes.

The pipes break my resolve.

Back in winter, one line froze and started gushing.

I ran to shut off the main outdoor valve—just in time.

The valve stem sheared off as I turned it.

Good thing it happened after I got it closed.

If it hadn’t, this post would be about a flood.

I left it like that for months. Let the problem hibernate. It was too cold anyway. The ground was frozen.

Now that the frosts are gone, I went out to assess the damage.

I thought I’d be digging deep, replacing the whole mess.

But somehow—miraculously—I managed a workaround.

New tool. Bit of pipe.

And now the valve turns on and off slowly, and with some trepidation. And that's good enough for me.

For now, anyway.