One of Sylvia Plath’s rejection slips said this: After a heavy rainfall, poems titled RAIN pour in from across the nation.
Inspiring poets find melancholy in the rain, beauty in the rain, the water that is the lifeforce of existence. They capture the way raindrops reflect in the sun, the sheets that fall horizontally in the wind, the downpour sounds as it lands on the roof and gushes over the gutter.
I found no beauty in the rain, not even melancholy, rather a panic at the uncontrollable nature of Mother Nature.
Where I live, we received a record rainfall amount in two days: over six inches. And the two days before that, it rained as well.
Our basement flooded once again.
Five or six years ago—I can’t seem to remember exactly—it rained and stormed all spring. After a brief thunderstorm, our basement flooded. Our sump pump had failed, but that wasn’t entirely the problem. When the previous owners installed a whirlpool tub in the basement, they must have had to add additional pipes or something, for the foundation revealed a repair. Water seeped in under the tub, flowing through the utility room to the drain, while in front of the bathroom door, water pooled, seeping in from the shitty repair which allowed water to flow through the cracks into the carpet.
Once the new sump pump was installed, it barely ran. We hadn’t heard it run for two or three years, we’ve been so dry. But the continuous rain and downpours and thunderstorms filled the water table. Our sump pump finally ran Friday morning, vomiting water every ninety seconds. By late afternoon, it was running every sixty seconds. Thunderstorms were forecasted before eleven PM, then we were promised a dry weekend.
Begrudgingly, my husband moved my son’s dorm carpet and my dress form tree from the utility room, which we stored in the narrow space between the furnace and the wall to the bathroom, the bottom of the wall open to the underbelly of the tub. I preached prevention and preparedness. He said nonsense. The basement only flooded because the sump pump failed, the same sump pump which was now running every thirty seconds.
The nine o’clock thunderstorms hovered over us, barely moving, downpour after downpour of rain. Around eleven, my son spotted it, like a black ink spot that grew bigger and bigger by the second. Water seeping through the carpet tile in the hallway.
Thus began our 36 hours of hell. Instead of pushing a rock up a hill only to have it roll back down again like Sisyphus for eternity, we were replacing wet towels with dry ones only to watch the water soak the towels again and again.
The smartest decision we made was using carpet tile instead of installing carpet in the basement again. I grumbled with the lack of choices of carpet tile, thinking we could find some obnoxious hotel pattern, but only neutral colors with muted patterns existed. Black squares with thin lines of gray gave the dreary basement a splash of style, but I dreaded setting up the Christmas village—even through my reindeer slippers, the freezing cement chills the tile and my feet. With only a rubber backing, the carpet tile is not known for its warmth or comfort.
Yet those carpet tiles saved us from any damage. We yanked those up in the hallway and the spot in front of the bathroom; a third leakage would occur near the door as the space under the tub filled with water, seeping under the mopboards.
Our sump pump just couldn’t keep up, like one lonely snail sent to clean an entire fishtank overrun with algae. The poor thing didn’t stand a chance.
We quickly ran out of towels—like every bath towel in the house, not just the crappy towels one saves to dry off muddy dog paws. My nice bath towels, the ones that dry my face after a shower, were thrown on the cement to sop up the groundwater that smelled faintly like mud and fertilizer. Beach towels and car towels quickly grew wet. Throwing sopping wet towels in the dryer took too long to dry, so into the washer on the spin cycle they went. My washer and dryer ran for over twelve hours straight. At first, we could barely keep up—the 26 minutes the washer took to rinse and spin while another batch of towels dried in the dryer was almost too long as the sopping towels began to run like little fingers on a river, the water unstoppable.
While one of us flipped towels, the other crouched in the corner of the utility room, squeegeeing the narrow space under the tub, unable to see a crack but knowing one must be there with as much water that pooled and flowed. We funneled the water through the gap in the wood frame of the wall, the gap my husband had cut during the last flood. He sawed a bigger avenue this time, widening the banks of the river in the hopes of directing it to the utility room rather than the walls. To urge the flow along, we used a huge broom to sweep the water into the floor drain.
By morning, we had to squeegee every thirty minutes; placing two towels folded just so would give us about sixty minutes over the spots outside the bathroom. Repeat for twelve more hours.
When the sump pump gained even two seconds in between emptying, we cheered. By bedtime, we dared only go ninety minutes, setting the alarm to wake us. The second time, I stretched it to two hours; by the third time, the water had stopped bubbling up through the crack in the floor, barely leaving much more than a puddle on a towel after three hours.
Outside, our sump pump hose had shot water right into a bunny nest. We saved two of them from drowning but lost another one the next day. The third little guy still hops around our backyard, a bit bigger and braver every day, while I worry our hundred-pound dog will accidentally trample it. On dog walks, we find baby birds, little featherless mounds of pink and blue on the sidewalk, whose nests flooded, washing the helpless babies from their homes. Such discoveries remind me that wet carpet tile and 36 hours of chaos isn’t all that much in the bigger picture.
A flood is a gift that keeps on giving. With fans pointed everywhere in my utility room, my pilot light on the water heater would not stay lit, forcing me to call a repairman. On my son’s yearly airplane convention trip—what he looks forward to all year long—they had to take a detour as the high rivers flooded the interstate as all that rainwater flowed south.
It’s Mother Nature who reminds us that our daily routines can crumble in seconds, that a peaceful Saturday could turn into a Sisyphus nightmare, that a good night’s sleep is never a guarantee. She shakes us into gratefulness for those lazy mornings, those lackadaisical afternoons, those blissful nights of uninterrupted sleep.
I’ve never been so grateful for a Monday morning, when I could go about my routine and do what I needed and wanted to do without the threat of a catastrophe just seconds away. I appreciated not having to set a timer to go downstairs and thanked my washer and dryer for not flaking out on me when I needed them the most. I go about my business as usual. For now.
It’s supposed to rain tomorrow.