Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Big Yellow Taxi

Nine days ago, on May 31, 2009, water ceased to flow at our house. Oh, the canal water still surges past the front of our property and under the bridge, but there's no merry sound of water being sucked down the drain or the toilet flushing. True enough, Bryan had been watering the garden regularly, but we have two 1500 gallon reservoirs that should not have gone dry. Our well was commissioned only about three and a half years ago, and we are not in a drought.

On Saturday the well digger who dug our well came. The diagnosis was that the pump at the well head was not operating. Of course, since we didn't opt for the "extended 5-year warranty" at the time we purchased the pump, our warranty was for only three years--not three years, five months, and seventeen days. (The product information claims that it is not uncommon for this particular pump to work for twenty years. Yeah, right.) Today, at a cost to us of only $1385, the well man is installing a new pump.

Having taken sponge baths for days (and even more days for Bryan since he didn't have the privilege of escaping to a luxury hotel in Kansas City for a week), making a 30-mile round trip to a hot springs resort to take a real shower, spending hours in the laundry mat doing five loads of clothes, filling 2-liter soda bottles and plastic milk jugs with water from work and church to haul home, and flushing the johns with water from 5-gallon buckets hoisted out of the canal, I don't think I'd mind spending $5,000 to see water come out of my kitchen sink faucet!

So, in the words of Joni Mitchell: Don't it always seem to go--you don't know what you got 'til it's gone. Amen to that.

1 comment:

Tierra Wakefield said...

I hope you didn't accidentally flush any baby sharks down the toilet.