By Maria Padhila
I don’t know how long Isaac and I would have yelled at each other if the repairman hadn’t rung to get buzzed in. We’ve been doing major renovations in our condo after a flood took out the downstairs bedroom and bathroom this summer, and on top of that, the other day the dishwasher runneth over.
The dishwasher is known around the house as the George W. Bush Memorial Dishwasher, because we replaced it sometime after 9-11, when the then-president gave selected households checks for a couple hundred bucks and told them to go shopping for America. Given its origins, it shouldn’t be surprising that every so often the dishwasher and the disposal get mixed up and start choking on each other’s drainages, resulting in a countertop flood. The dishwasher is doing a heckuva job.
But the downstairs flood is what has touched off the topic of dispute between me and my legal husband. The day before, while I was at work, he had made one of the usual three or four calls the reconstruction has made necessary — there’s always some question about where something needs to go — and he told me he’d put some things in the trash room.
Over the past decade, I’d shoved a lot of stuff into my closet. One of the things I asked for in the flood renovation was to turn my big closet into a storage area we could all use — something that could hold the camping supplies, for instance, so they didn’t fill up the entryway. This meant that when the construction people put in new floors and drywall, they also reconfigured the big closet space. I had to take everything out. It is now in boxes and bins stacked all over the one usable room of our place. Isaac and I have been sleeping on an air mattress for a month. I have been living like a bag lady. [This really gets the message across musically, and is worth the watching.] We’re a little touchy.