Day 10, Part 2: Blooms and Games
around the house
Tuesday Evening
Finishing Basement
We woke to foggy weather. In Lipnica, that always meant a gloriously sunny afternoon. Here -- I'm not so sure. It stayed cloudy most of the morning before turning sunny.
It might mean sleepiness if it's Sunday. Everyone was tired this morning: L because she's a thirteen-year-old; E because he's sick; K and I because that's how we normally wake up.
Or it might mean more work in the basement.
And then snow
They say weather in South Carolina is ridiculously unpredictable. It can be forty degrees colder today than it was yesterday; it can go from cloudless to monsoons to cloudless in no time; it can rain today and snow tomorrow.
We've had weather like that the last few days.
Thursday we flooded; Friday was cloudless and windy; today, it snowed.
I first noticed the smallest of flakes when I came up from the basement where I've been sealing holes drilled years ago for termite treatment and sealed only with about an eighth of an inch of concrete: I can push through with my finger, it turns out. Yesterday and today I patched 21 such holes, and it's a time-consuming process: each hole has a cavity under it from erosion (I guess), and it takes an unbelievable amount of hydraulic cement to patch each hole.
"Ohe thing about a flood like that is that it will show you your weaknesses," said my neighbor. And one weakness exposed: a crack in the slab beside the fireplace. Water was pouring in through that crack Thursday -- probably about a gallon a minute at its worst.
So after an hour or so of drilling and chiseling this evening, I finished the last bit of patching. Until I remembered one more wall in the other room that I hadn't checked. A quick check revealed what I knew was the case: still more holes...
And of course, I didn't finish the crack...
The Flood of 2020: Aftermath
Today we got to see what the county looked like while the rain poured yesterday. It was pretty much as you might expect.
We also go to see what damage the food did to our backyard. It was pretty much as you might expect.
I was on my way to school when K called to say that school had in fact been canceled, so returning, I stopped by our favorite park to see how the dam looked. It was pretty much as you might expect.
Finally, I searched for video footage of what people were experiencing in the county and Google delivered to me a couple of videos of what people have done in previous floods in the area.
It was pretty much as you might expect.
The Flood of 2020
We knew the storm was coming: the forecast for our area was around two inches. "That's enough to flood our basement if it comes fast enough," I thought.
When I left for work, it wasn't raining; when I got to work, it was. Still, I thought we might be able to squeak through without much harm.
K took L to the doctor in the morning and then went back to the house before heading to work. She texted me at 10:36: "I'm back home. I am working from home today. It looks pretty bad. I'm going to keep an eye on the basement."
At 10:42, she sent me another text: "I just saw the sump pump turn on and pump out a little bit of water. There is a little water under the plastic [vapor barrier in the crawl space]. It doesn't look good for today."
She sent me a picture a minute later:
"Oh, there's no way we're going to escape a flooded basement," I thought. Still, it's usually no big deal: we work for a couple of hours with a shop-vac and everything's fine.
"Those hammocks will get destroyed," I replied. Then ten minutes later at 10:54, I text: "Can you see water going into the pump basin? A trickle from the basement side perhaps?"
At 11:04 she sent me another picture.
And then two minutes later, at 11:06, the next text from K: "The basement is flooding."
The trouble was, I couldn't just dash away. We at school were having our own adventure: not a drill but an actual shelter-in-place reality. Three hundred eighth graders huddled against the wall in the corridor for almost forty minutes.
At 11:25, I texted our neighbor: "You guys flooding?"
"Creeks are bad...house is fine," he responded. With pictures.
"K said we're flooding," I texted. "I'm stuck here because we're in a tornado lockdown."
"Want me to go help her?" he immediately replied. And that, ladies and gentlemen, would be exhibit 344,038 for the argument that he is the best neighbor one could have.
Finally, when we had everything under control at the school and the kids fed and watered, I got a text from K at 12:35: "I have been pumping for an hour and a half now. G[, our neighbor,] is here to help. I think you should come home as soon as possible. The rain is not going to stop and water is coming in like through a faucet."
I went to the cafeteria and found the eighth-grade administrator. "My wife just said that our basement is flooding. I'm heading home. Someone's going to have to cover my last three classes."
"Go," he said.
I went to the front office, where the sixth-grade administrator was talking to the receptionist. "My wife just said that our basement is flooding," I began. "And you need coverage," the receptionist said. "On it."
"Go," said both the administrator and receptionist.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, along with the calm way they implemented the tornado shelter-in-place lockdown would be exhibit 344,038 for the argument that our school faculty knows how to work an emergency.
"Water is coming through the termite treatment holes," K texted me on the way home. A few years I'd dug out the "filler compound" with which whoever did that patched the wholes. The material crumbled under the lightest touch of a screwdriver blade. I had cleaned out all the holes on the out-facing walls and patched them. "Guess I didn't do a good job," it thought, stopping at the hardware store on the way home to buy some rubber plugs for the holes.
But this water was coming from holes in the inner basement walls -- where I hadn't touched any of the holes. "What can possibly happen here?" I thought.
A lot.
The water was jetting out of the holes, making little fountains just about two to three inches high -- that's how much hydrostatic pressure had built up under our house. We plugged the holes, moved some shelves and found more fountains, plugged those, and vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed.
It was a first: both rooms of our half-basement were flooding. And so we vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed.
K went to get the kids. I stayed behind and vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed. And vacuumed.
We finally got everything under control around dinner time. At 5:48, I texted our selfless neighbor, "I can only just now say that I think we've got both rooms completely under control."
And now, at 9:46, I hear the sump pump kick in for about the tenth time since I began writing this, so I guess it's about time to head downstairs and see if it's flooding again -- it's not supposed to stop raining until after midnight...
But we're not the only ones on our street, or even the worst off. And this flood seems to have enveloped much of the South itself.
At one point in the evening, shortly after dinner, the power flicked off and stayed disconnected for a good fifteen seconds -- long enough that I'd started running options through my head. When the lights came back on, K and I looked at each other, thinking about all the reports of downed trees and power lines, realizing just how much worse it could have been.
We had it worse than we've ever had it, but we could have had it worse still.
Previous Floods
Flood 2018
Water
Flood 2014
Flood
Finishing Up
The Girl has some new furniture. She asked me to help; I did, for a while. But I resisted as well. Not because I wanted to do something else. I thought that at her age, she might get more out of doing a lot of it herself — a sense of accomplishment is a valuable feeling.
Tonight, she worked on the drawers to her desk. In fact, she completed them. And the rest of the desk, as a matter of fact.
I did what I do probably too much: I photographed the event. As she gets older, the Girl is less thrilled with my photographic attention.
Which, given this generation’s obsession with selfies, strikes me as a little odd.
Blessing 2020
I first noticed it at a friend's house. Above one of the doors were some numbers and letters, and I thought it was perhaps a marking left behind during construction -- some kind of measurement or something. Of course, the house in question was long finished: it was not one of the half-built, "raw" houses that dotted the road that ran through Lipnica. This was a fully completed house, but I didn't really think about that. I just didn't have any idea why someone would write something in chalk on the wall.
And then I married a Polish Catholic and found out: it's the indication of the blessing of the house.
I've grown much more skeptical in the last few years and tend to have to fight the temptation to view these things as I once did, which is not all that positively. To begin with, the priest is supposed to do it. Our priest leaves a basket of blessed chalk in the church narthex with a card that includes instructions and the prayers. This year, we didn't get the blessed chalk, so we just used chalk that we bought at Walmart. Does that make a difference? Ontologically, it should: if not blessing it didn't make a difference, why bless it to begin with? And what exactly does blessing the chalk do? Is it possible to discern the difference between blessed and unblessed chalk?
There's not even consensus about the origin and meaning of what one writes in chalk:
The origin of this ritual comes from eastern Europe where homeowners mark their doors with the sign 20+C+M+B=(year). CMB are the initials of the three Wise Men: Caspar, Melchoir and Balthasar who are remembered on the Feast of Epiphany.
Another interpretation given of this sign is: Christus Mansionem Bededicat (Christ Blesses this Mansion). We welcome you to bless your home for the New Year using the blessed chalk and rite given below:
One person makes the inscription with chalk above the door (20+C+M+B+14), while another proclaims the corresponding words: The three Wise Men, Caspar, Melchoir, and Balthasar followed the star of God’s son who became Man (20) two thousand years ago. (+) May Christ bless our dwelling (+) and remain with us throughout the New Year.
If we don't know what it means, doesn't that kind of make it, well, useless?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. Perhaps what's more important is the unity involved in the process, both in the blessing itself and in the overarching idea. It keeps us thinking about the house as not just as a building, a location, but as a home, an idea.
New Furniture
L wanted new furniture in her room. Truth be told, she’d outgrown a lot of what she already had, so it was a need rather than a want — surprising, I know.
So Saturday, the Girl and the Boy hopped into the van (we still haven’t sold it) one last time and headed to their favorite Sweedish store.
Destruction
On May 30 of last year, there was an enormous fire just about a mile from where we live. The home was completely destroyed, and only a few weeks later, its remains were razed.
Here are a couple of articles about the incident:
- 2 firefighters injured battling house fire in Mauldin, officials say
- Video shows firefighters battling Upstate house fire
Just yesterday, there was another fire in the same area. In fact, the locations are less than a quarter of a mile away from each other.
As with the other fire, I was unaware of it until after it occurred. I would have thought we'd hear the sirens and realize how close they were coming, but perhaps not.
Crews: Mauldin home fire tears through attic
All of this, of course, got me thinking, got me remembering. When I was in high school, a home two doors down from us caught on fire when lightning struck an air conditioner and started a fire in the second story. Dad and I were home; Mom was somewhere. She panicked when she was stopped from entering the development and heard that the fire was on our street. The officers holding back traffic told her the address of the fire and she breathed an audible sigh of relief, I'm sure. Perhaps shed a tear of relief as well as tears of sorrow for our neighbors.