Has everyone thawed out from the icy polar vortex that froze our eyeballs the moment we stepped outside this past weekend? Yes? Good.
I was fortunate not to lose power, other than a 20-second blip on Friday. And thankfully, the pipes held.
My mother died in 2020, just as the COVID lockdown started — her death was not due to virus — and she left my brother and me a small sum of money each. Nothing stupendous. My father, who died in 2013, was a millwright in the company that later became Rockwell International. Years after he retired, the company rose to space shuttle fame, but he was not in on that high-falutin’ development. He just fixed things, and he didn’t make a lot of money. Mom worked as a secretary off and on for the schools, but nothing long-term.
Knowing how tight things were growing up, and how they scrimped on everything, it was really hard to spend any of my inheritance. I did a few small things, like updating our phones and having a tree removed that was dragging on the roof. I even had new gutters put on, since they were pretty bad.
But bigger expenditures stalled me. We desperately needed the bathroom redone, as the tile around the tub was literally falling off the wall, and the tub was tilting due to a leak that had rotted the corner of the subfloor, which I didn’t know. When the contractors discovered that, I was very relieved that I had not decided to do one of those tuband- surround covers, which wouldn’t have revealed that.
As part of the project, I looked at the plumbing. A plumber had told me about seven years prior that my ridiculously soft old copper pipes were living on borrowed time. The pipe over the washing machine dripped on me as I loaded and unloaded it. Things stored in the furnace room were not safe from drips. Things were damaged. But because it was a chunk of change to fix, I borrowed more time for those pipes. I sweated every cold snap.
But the bathroom project was the ideal time to do it, so I took a deep breath and committed. Believe me, I sweated that decision, hoping my father would approve of the choice.
This past weekend, as the furnace hummed and the pipes held, I finally let out the breath I’d been holding.
I could see him nodding in his rocking chair. A man of few words, I could hear what he would say.
“Yep, that was smart.” Thanks, Dad.
