Bubbling in the Basement
When it rains, it pours, as the Morton Salt people say, and they sure got it right. Here in our little valley, the rain and the excitement just keep coming. Last night we went to sleep in the midst of a bombastic thunderstorm and woke up at 4:30 in the morning to the sound of a waterfall in our basement.
More accurately, I was woken at 4 am by a raucous round of close lightning. I thought I’d better get up and see if all the windows were closed against the blowing downpour and if branches were down on anything important. As I completed my rounds and headed back for bed, I decided to pop into the basement and see if we had any of the dripping that occasionally seeps through the old stone and brick foundations. Halfway down the steps I heard running water and knew I was about to encounter something that would keep me out of bed for quite a while. We owned an older house in Chicago that periodically sprung leaks in the basement, or roof or the odd light fixture, depending on the direction and force of a rainstorm. But we apparently haven’t yet discovered all the lurking chinks in This Old Farmhouse.
Our old heating oil tank was somehow functioning like a faucet, a stream burbling out of a connector or gauge protruding from its lower right end. A puddle was moving toward paper bags and cardboard boxes filled with books as yet unpacked since our move three years ago. I ran upstairs to wake the kids and dragged them into the rapidly flooding basement to operate a suck-and-empty fireman’s line with two shop vacs. Shannon was peacefully sleeping in Illinois on a business trip. An hour later as the storm abated, the boxes were piled safely in our dining room, the puddle was gone and a fan was blowing over the wet floor. I fell into bed, still damp from my excursions to the barn for shop vacs and plastic storage bins to catch leaks that might sprout while I slept. The girls, by now wide awake, set up camp in the living room to watch movies, while Jake pulled out the X-Box. Summer fun.
