Basement deluge damages keepsakes, but memories survive | Theodore Decker
My aversion to DIY plumbing started with a drip here, a drop there.
Replace the flapper in a toilet tank, and the water shutoff valve would dribble. Tweak something in one place, and the problem would spring up farther down the water line. Plumbing, my version of it as least, was a game of Whac-A-Mole. Nothing ever was truly fixed.
I knew the stakes were potentially high. But for a long time I remained lucky.
I'd place a plastic container beneath a leaky valve to catch an intermittent drip, and eventually it would stop. I saw in the coppery-green crud built up on assorted pipe connections not the threat of a corrosive breach but signs of a natural equilibrium. Just leave it be, and things will be all right. Don't poke the ballcock.
It was after I flooded the basement that I swore off all plumbing.
That problem started when I moved the refrigerator to clean and ruptured the water line to the ice maker.
This fridge had come with the house. I traced the line down through the kitchen floor and followed it to its source in the basement. I shut off the water and reconnected the line. No biggie. But I noticed that in the middle of the line, tucked between some joists, was an in-line water filter.
Must be pretty old, I thought. Might as well replace it. I tracked the parts down online.
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After switching out the filters I retired to the backyard hammock, basking in a job well done.
I was there maybe 30 minutes when my wife came running.
This was no intermittent drip. This was a geyser, and it was drowning the basement with the efficacy of a fire suppression system.
And directly below it was the box that contained Kid No. 1's pre- and grade school projects and artwork.
We dried out what we could, but much of it was trashed. And in that moment, holding stacks of sopping wet construction paper and bleeding, colored marker drawings, I was certain that I was the most incompetent dad in the world. This was an epic parenting fail.
My wife, the more practical one, learned from the incident. She took the equivalent keepsakes from Kid No. 2 and placed them on a top shelf in the basement, as high as she could.
And that's where they remained until our dishwasher sprung a leak last week, directly above that shelf.
This time my wife shouldered the blame, although she had no reason to. I had screwed up a basic home repair; all she had done was start the dishwasher.
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The leak wasn't a big one, but judging by the damage it had been going on for a while without us noticing.
As she paged through the binder from Rainbow Steps preschool, I could tell something besides the plumbing was about spring a leak.
A googly plastic eye from the "shape monster" fell to the floor. A marker drawing of our stick-figure family had bled onto preceding pages.
"This is my dad..." read another page. The bottom half of the drawing was soaked, but I could still see that she had nailed my typical uniform: black concert T-shirt.
The photos from Dad's Night and Mother's Day Tea had survived.
We dried the book with a hair dryer and set it outside on the front porch.
This time the damage didn't hit me as hard as it had the first time. I tried to figure out why.
Flipping through it again, I saw the mishap in a different light. Page after page had taken on dreamy blur. This, I realized, was an almost perfect representation of my memories.
Blurred around the edges. Fading with age, and to a degree, washing away. The colors were muted, but all still there.
And on the final page, a small gift.
"This is what I looked like in May 2011!!!" Our daughter had chosen to draw her last picture, her "graduation" self, in colored pencil instead of the ubiquitous markers.
There she was, just as she saw herself back then. Brown hair and big smile, unaffected by time and water, the same as the day it was drawn by her 5-year-old hand.
Theodore Decker is the Dispatch metro columnist.
@Theodore_Decker
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Decker: Plumbing mishaps damage keepsakes, but memories linger
