Notes from Maine - 2024/07/07
Plumbing can be easy at times, but I’ve never found it enjoyable. My drain installation doesn’t look like any of the pictures I can find online. Because my kitchen sink is directly below a window (aren’t they all?) the vent pipe has to take a jog to the left before it goes into the wall and up through the roof. The last people to remodel the kitchen put the drain trap in the cellar. I hate that. In my opinion, serviceable parts should be upstairs. Because of their choices, my new plumbing provides the drain water a fun adventure, rolling up down and around before heading for the septic. It doesn’t leak (anymore). That’s a plus.
I don’t have a garbage disposal. Ever since I was responsible for maintaining the plumbing at my grandmother’s house, I’m not a fan. She put everything in that disposal except the rubber bands from lobster claws. With those bands, she was extremely careful. Grease, butter, eggshells, peels, and tons of other ready-made clogs would go straight in. One Thanksgiving the sink stopped up. I was getting ready to snake the drain but my father’s friend suggested boiling water. It worked. I suspect that a grease clog was just moved a few feet down the line, ready to block again, but we made it through Thanksgiving.
For my grandmother, it was an enormous relief.
Have you ever been in a room so quiet that you can hear your own heartbeat? With no other stimulus, the smallest sound echoes and booms. My grandmother was like that with worry. If she had nothing else to worry about, she would take the smallest molehill and envision that it was a mountain. A clogged sink on Thanksgiving was nearly the end of the world, and the resolution of that crisis absolutely delighted her.
I have that tendency. In the absence of real problems in my life, I’ll take something small and fret over it. Right now I’m going back and forth on what kind of faucet to get for my kitchen. There’s an enormous range of price and features. I’m concerned that I’ll purchase some beautiful, sleek, modern marvel and it will take five minutes to fill a pot with water. I’m all for conservation of water, but can’t I be trusted to regulate the flow of the faucet? Does the faucet have to limit me to less than two gallons per minute? When I fill the horse buckets in the barn, it takes twenty-six seconds to fill a five gallon bucket. My well can produce nearly twelve gallons per minute. Assuming that I’m not some monster who will let the water run and run with no regards to conversation, why does my kitchen faucet have to dribble out the water? Maybe I’m being dramatic—that’s my tendency, as I’ve admitted. With my old faucet, I rebuilt the interior for maximum flow. I’m afraid I won’t be able to customize a new one so thoroughly. I suppose I could use the old one. It’s downstairs on my bench at the moment. It just doesn’t fit the aesthetic of the new kitchen. These are the big problems in my world.
My grandmother would be 115 this year if she hadn’t died twenty years ago. I don’t mean to paint her as a worrywart, she was a lovely person. I miss her stories. I don’t need to have every detail, I just miss listening to her tell them. There’s a chair in one of my guest rooms—it was my grandfather’s chair. Sitting in that weird, low-slung chair with my arms on that itchy fabric, I listened to all of those stories a million times until I thought I could never forget them. The details are unimportant, but it would be lovely to hear her voice again, talking about selling her father’s furniture or the one-armed elevator operator in Colorado.
I’m going to hook up the dishwasher today. I don’t anticipate using it any time soon, but I want to get it out of the way. In order to require a dishwasher, one has to have dishes, and I don’t. I have one bowl, one spoon, one plate, and one fork. Everything else is still packed away. I made contact with a counter company yesterday. That’s one part of this project that I no longer want to tackle. Initially, I envisioned constructing concrete counters. Some of them look really good. But I don’t want to learn that skill in a kitchen that has already taken so much time. Getting it wrong would mean too much backtracking. I’m not the best at backtracking.
