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.
