(This is part of the Slice of Life Project)
It used to be that I would dread waking up in the morning and opening up the basement door. I always expected to be greeted by a layer of water. Noah, I wasn’t. Sometimes my fears would come true. We live near the bottom of a hill and gravity pulls the streams of run-off water from other homes beneath our house. It didn’t help that our foundation had cracks in which water would visibly bubble up from beneath in the rainy seasons (spring and fall). It was horrible. I remember spending long hours lugging buckets of water up the stairs and out the door and then worrying about the mold being left behind.
It was the health concerns that finally moved us into action.
Two years ago, we got smart. We invested a good bit of money for construction to fix the mess. The guys came in one day and dug a trench around the entire indoor perimeter of our basement, laid down some pipes and fed the collected water into a sump pit, where we put in a sump pump that has earned it rightful place in the family album.
This time of year, the pump seems to work non-stop, glugging away like some monster in the basement. The strangest sound, though, comes after the pump has done its work. The water first flows up, and then over, and then out into the drain-water system (we may be illegally hooked into the city’s pipes, so you must swear to secrecy). There must be some trap door in the piping and the water sloshes and galoshes as if it were the ocean. It moves back and forth and back and forth (When my poor dad sleeps over, his bed is on the couch in the living room and that is the soundtrack he has to listen to all night — the pump kicking in and the water moving through the pipes — not exactly soothing night sounds — Hi Dad! — he reads my blog sometimes)
I went down there with my voice recorder to capture the sounds, although it doesn’t do it justice. So, today, I offer up this audio Slice of Life from the confines of my basement. It’s dry down there. Plenty dry. But water still flows.
Take a listen to the water flow.
Now we just pray the pump never fails. We’re in big trouble if that happens. And if it happens, I am packing up and moving to the top of the mountain for higher ground.
Peace (in pumps),
Kevin