Devonne Brown

“Mom, something’s wrong with the kitchen sink,” Nick skidded into the family room in his socks. 

“I just spent 4500 dollars getting it fixed, what do you mean something’s wrong with the kitchen sink?”

“It’s backed up and not draining. When I turned on the disposal, it splashed both sides and didn’t go down,” all Nick needed was a suit and shoes and he’d make a wonderful anchor man for CNN. He delighted in telling me all about the mess in the kitchen. He used his deepest baritone to relay the message. “It’s fucked up, bad,” his final pronouncement. 

I looked outside, then at my phone. Maybe replacing the drain and a pipe between the sink and the washing machine two days ago, in dead winter, wasn’t a great idea…but it was the only option. Now, the kitchen was as bad as it had been before, maybe worse. An ice block in the new line refused to let water through. It might be days before it melted enough to be useful. Thank god I did laundry yesterday.

The last thing a little old lady with bad knees wants to do in the dark is venture into the snow and make deep footprints. This little old lady wanted to stay inside the house in her sweat suit and booties, sip hot coffee with cocoa in it, and listen to the birds that sing in the dark.

What would I have been able to do if I could find the ice clog? Light a bonfire over top of it and hope the woods, the house, the hill went up in a ball of fire so we could start over.

Plumbing issues make people crazy fast. 

The baritone anchor voice came back, “Mom, coffee in your favorite mug. Sit down. We’ll figure this out together.

“Ok, I’ve got it sorted. We need big silver electric heating blankets, several actually. We’ll wrap the back of the house where the drains are frozen, the yard where the drains are buried, We’ll get everything warm again, going from minus 5 to 40 is going to take a while, but if we shrink wrap the house in plastic electric blankets, everything will be solved. Everything will be warm and insulated. Perfect.”

“Are you nine or high?” I asked Nick.

He burped in my face. Either one could be true.

I wanted to tear down the house and replace it with a double wide trailer. In West Virginia, dumber things had happened.