The Water Must Flow

So there we are. Last weekend. My wife’s birthday bash at our house. We’re all full of food, full of drink, full of the joy of each other’s company. Were you to walk through this gathering, you’d hear snippets of witty conversation and astute observations about any number of topics. But then somewhere in there, you’d hear something else. 

“Uh, dude, our sump pump’s making a fucked up sound.” 

Yes, it’s true. Right at the tail end of my wife’s birthday party, our house belched up the best gift of all: no more indoor plumbing. 

The long and the short of it is that it’s fixed now and we can once again allow water to flow out through its various exits, along with all the wonderful things that water sweeps away with it, only a small amount of which backed itself up into one of our bathrooms. Really, it could have been so much worse. 

The plumber that came to our rescue labored outside for several cold drizzly hours, and when he was done, I thought to myself, never again will I take our waste-water system for granted. But then I thought, wait, of course I will. I take stuff like that for granted all the time. 

Sure, in that moment, and now as I’m sitting here thinking about it, I’m quite aware of all the mechanisms in place that allow us to send water and its baggage on its merry way. And then last night, when somebody smashed their car into a utility pole and knocked out the electricity in our hood, I was very aware of it, too (that’s right, we lost water and power in one weekend. It was Little House On the Prairie up in here). But gratitude for everyday conveniences is a fleeting thing, am I right? We only think about them when we’re forced to do without them. And I know I’m not the only one here. I’ve seen your Facebook statuses. I’ve read your tweets. 

Truth is, though, I tend not to be as grateful of a person as I’d like to be. I’m aware, in a theoretical sense, of the power of gratitude to increase one’s happiness, but I’m not often so great at making the leap into actually being grateful. At least not on a regular basis. I have a shitty way of focusing on the things I don’t have instead of the things I do, even though I try to instill gratitude in my kids all the time. Be grateful, dammit! Honestly, on the list of things about myself that I wish I could just change with a snap of my fingers, this is probably in the top 3, right up there with the ability to draw and having a sixth finger on each hand. 

Maybe it’s the issue of it being a thing of being, of being a certain way, as opposed to doing something. Perhaps the doing leads to the being. Do the gratitude, be the gratitude, or some such snippet of wisdom.

So how’s this for some doing? A look back over this past weekend’s adventures with my gratitude goggles on. I present to you a list of things I’m thankful for, in spite of the shit.

• That we only had to do without indoor plumbing for about a day and a half.
• That my in-laws live just a few minutes away and let us use their facilities.
• That the sump pump broke near the end of the party rather than the start, because dude? We went through some beer.
• Speaking of beer, I’m very grateful that my friends all have such good taste in the stuff. Nobody shows up with piss.
• That I’m married to this wonderful woman and was able to celebrate her birthday with her:

So cute

• That so many of my friends are such fantastic cooks. Seriously, when we do a potluck, we eat well.
• That getting our plumbing fixed cost us far less than we were fearing, because bullets: we were sweating them.
• That it’s still possible to write even if you can’t flush the toilet in the other room, as evidenced by the fact that I still got in lots of writing. Yeah, that novel? Still writing it. Maybe one day I’ll even finish it. 
• That we all remained civil, even cheerful through the whole thing. 
• That the plumbing outage and the power outage did not occur simultaneously. 

I might be back to not thinking about the portal opened by the little handle on the toilet as soon as tomorrow, but for this moment at least, I’m pretty stoked that the damn thing works.

House of love

Recall, if you will, that whole house thing I was all scared to even talk about a while back. Well, the deal went through, money and keys changed hands, and the house is ours. We moved last Friday, thus saying goodbye to the teeny little rent house that my wife had taken to calling The Shack, and hello to a house that we're falling more and more in love with. I love the house, the yard, the deck, the trees, the street it's on, the talkative old neighbor, the whole package. I even love the idea that I've got a ton of home improvement projects in my future. A lot of things worked in our favor to make this happen, not least among them a very cool landlord who let us out of our lease free and clear, asking only that we list the house for rent on craigslist for him. I ask you, whoever heard of such coolness?

This is eldest son's third move in his short life, and I'm determined to make it his last until he heads off to college. He seems to have picked up on the fact that this place is, in fact, the house where he lives now. We tried to reenforce that feeling after cleaning up the rent house by going around and saying goodbye to all his favorite spots there. Goodbye green room. Goodbye mommy daddy room. Goodbye back yard. It was cute, but I gotta say, it was not a difficult farewell.

We got to meet the woman who was selling the house. She lived here for almost 30 years, almost as long as the house has existed. She raised her kids here, and seemed to get a little bit emotional while we talked about it. She met the boys, and seemed happy to see that there would be children living here.

Earlier this evening, The Ash and I were putting our clothes away, and were raving about how we actually had room to put everything away without having to squash it all together. It occurred to me that it's good to be reminded not to take little luxuries for granted. A little gratitude always feels good.