ERIC'S BIT or IS IT OUT TO GET US?
It's 6:30 in the morning. Having stayed awake all night, I'm relieved to see the world outside the windows reappear in the pewter colored light before dawn. Sitting alone in the silence through the dark hours I begin to feel as if there's nothing left but me and the glowing screen of my laptop.
During the worst winter weather Mary and I take turns making sure the well pump runs periodically to keep the water line under the house from freezing. I'm on the night shift.
It's not so bad compared to squeezing into the crawlspace under the house to thaw the water line. Otherwise I'd surely have been forced to venture under there with temperatures falling to eleven below zero two nights in a row. And that's Fahrenheit below zero, not your wimpy Celsius below zero.
The last time the pipes froze -- and I do hope it's the last time -- we went to bed with running water and got up to find the drip we'd left on in the sinks had stopped. I turned on the taps but only a death rattle came out.
To get at the line, I had to dig frozen snow away from the panel covering the crawlspace entrance in the cinderblock foundation. Peering in I could see the orange lights on the trusty heat tapes coiled around most of the plumbing glowing softly through layers of dust and cobwebs. The tapes couldn't be extended to reach the full length of the water line where it emerges from the ground and through a hole in the outer wall towards the front of the house. Don't ask me why. I'm not a plumber or an electrician.
I got down on my hands and knees and squeezed into the tight space under the house, only a couple cinder blocks high, too narrow for me to roll over on my shoulder in some spots. It's a bit like being inside a sub-zero MRI machine, filled with dirt, hanging insulation, and criss-crossed by wires and pipes. At least the monstrous spiders that lurk under there were all frozen solid.
I managed to push and pull myself over to where I guessed the problem was and directed the heat gun into the rubble-filled mouth of the line's den. At that point the doubts arrive. What if it won't thaw this time, or the plastic pipe bursts? Water and electricity don't play well together, do they? It felt like hours before I heard loosened ice rattling up the line and Mary called down from above that the water was back. Probably it didn't take more than fifteen minutes before I was able to return from the underworld.
So as the sun rises I've avoided that adventure this time. Mary insists this house isn't out to get us, but sometimes I wonder.
AND FINALLY
We'll close with belated but sincere good wishes to our subscribers for this new year, and a reminder the next Orphan Scrivener will roll into their in-boxes on April 15th, a date unfortunately easy to remember.
See you then!
Mary R and Eric
who invite you to visit their home page, to be found hanging out on the virtual washing line that is the Web at http://home.earthlink.net/~maywrite/ There you'll discover the usual suspects, including more personal essays, a bibliography, and our growing libraries of links to free e-texts of classic and Golden Age mysteries, ghost stories, and tales of the supernatural. There's also the Orphan Scrivener archive, so don't say you weren't warned! Our joint blog is at http://ericreedmysteries.blogspot.com/ Intrepid subscribers may also wish to know our noms des Twitter are @marymaywrite and @groggytales Drop in some time!
