H2O Bungalow

Trying to be a perfect little Housewife, I watered the front garden thoroughly today; in fact, I left the hose running while I ran errands, picked up Smoochie, took a leisurely walk through the neighborhood. What I was really doing, in fact, was flooding the basement.

And this is not the first time such a thing has happened--nope: it's the fourth. The other three:

1. 1989, Davis California. To try and control the heat in our nasty tenement student apartment, Luke left the shower running on cold while we sat in another room, sweating miserably over Chaucer papers. Being that this was not, shall we say, the most elegant of abodes, the drain of course backed up and flooded the apartment below us. Out of the natural fear of the foreigner in America as well as the natural poverty of the intellectual in America, we feigned complete ignorance, for which i would now like to apologize to the poor math geek below us and to whatever water-based gods we obviously annoyed at that time.

2. 2003, Laubenheim, Germany. Many months pregnant, bitter, hepped up on chocolate, I attempt to do the laundry, but forget to run the little drainage pipe into the bathtub. Instead, it goes the length and breadth of our apartment. We spend three days watching the Americans bomb Baghdad as we jump up and down on towels and sheets trying to soak up the water.

3. 2005, Calgary. during the "storm of the century," our sewer backs up and we are forced from our home for a month by a ruinous flood constituted principally by our neighbors' pee. I think they all ate a lot of asparagus that rainy night.

Time to do a little karmic readjustment, methinks. Time perhaps to make another donation to the Red Cross Tsunami Fund or the Katrina fund or the latest Bangladeshi nonsense. Time perhaps to make a BIG donation. Time to rent "The Poseiden Adventure" and pray that Shelley Winters makes it this time.

Ahoy.