Sometimes sweet . . . Sometimes tart . . . Always a slice of life.

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

While You Were Gone


        My husband John is a scientist and a leader in his field of environmental toxicology. He travels a lot to do research and to present the results at scientific conferences around the world. While he’s on the road, I hold the fort down here at home.

        In the beginning, I whined about him traveling so much. There weren’t any cell phones so he’d buy calling cards and try to navigate through foreign operators to call home. I’d pull the phone into the bathroom while bathing our kids so I wouldn’t miss it if he called from exotic places on the other side of the world, like Thailand. Email made things better. For some reason I don’t worry about him as much as long as I know that he’s gotten to his destination safely.

        He’d return home with gifts and foreign money to give the kids, and entertaining stories about adventures on his travels: Germans who thought he was with their group, Asians telling him what they disliked about the other Asians, soaring in a crop duster over Rota, animals seen on African safaris, and why America is the best in the world—our bathrooms.

     He waited until the kids were older to tell the stories about almost getting shot in Paraguay, or being detained in England because they thought he was an Irish terrorist. One day he’ll have to write a book!

        Now that the kids are grown and it’s just me at home when he’s gone, I treat it like a staycation. While the cat’s away, I don’t make the bed. I stay up late and sleep in. I don’t wear makeup, other than lip gloss. I treat myself to Hawaiian Pizza from Papa Murphy’s. (John doesn’t like pineapple on pizza, so we never get it when he’s home).
I eat breakfast for dinner and snacks for meals. I control the remote and watch chick flicks on TV. I listen to hip hop and new age music. I’ve had more than a few all-night quilting sessions. It’s not like John has ever forbidden me from cleaning house, but for some reason when he’s gone, I get into deep domestic organization. I clean out kitchen cabinets and bedroom closets, reorganizing drawers and my sewing room. It’s fun/lazy time in the Stark house!

        But the undercurrent of all this carefree frivolity is that like clockwork, when he’s gone, there’s always a crisis. It’s like our house acts out as soon as he takes his suitcase through the door. Cars break down. Roofs leak. The last time, our 14-year-old dog got so sick I wondered if he was going to make it.

        This time John left at the start of a major storm. While he flew to Australia, the weekend storm got worse: lots of thunder, lightning, and record breaking rainfall topped off by a tornado (a rarity here) only seven miles away. When TV weather forecasters showed the storm on the map, it looked like a swirling, nameless hurricane to me, complete with predicted gusts of 65 mph.

        I battened down the hatches.  As the rain pounded down through the night, I was glad that we’d gotten a new roof this past winter, and also thankful that we’d had someone trim widow makers off our trees this summer. Although 7,500 lost power, ours stayed on.

        Monday, after the worst of the storm had passed, I woke up and thought the house felt colder than usual. Our programmable thermostat sat at 64, but I didn’t hear or feel the heater kicking on, even though it’s supposed to be 68 degrees when we’re awake. I checked the gas furnace and the pilot light was out. I’d light it when I got back home from Zumba.

        Lighting the pilot light, simple right? Wrong. I took the cover off the furnace and poked around, but couldn’t figure out where the flame should be.

        I got online and looked for instructions. It all sounded straight forward. Wedged in again between the hot water heater and the furnace, equipped with a flashlight, and long BIC lighter I failed again to hear the whoosh of gas igniting.

        Back at the computer, I watched YouTube videos of guys lighting pilot lights. I turned the thermostat down to 45 degrees and went back downstairs to the basement. 
       
Kneeling before the furnace again, flipping switches, turning knobs, and pushing the red button for 60 seconds, absolutely nothing happened.

        The house was getting colder. I emailed John 9 hours and a day ahead in Australia. I also emailed Johnny asking for advice. I was beginning to think that pilot lighting is hard wired in males only. If only I could channel some man magic! I didn’t remember John going through all this the few times the pilot light had gone out before.

        Johnny called. Hopefully his father had passed the pilot lighting torch onto him. He hadn’t. He said he didn’t know how John lit it. However, he did warn me to stop waving the lighter around when I was pushing that red button. He asked if I’d lost power during the storm, and told me to check the circuit breakers to see if the one for the furnace had tripped. It hadn’t. He thought I should call a furnace man.

        John’s email told me that he couldn’t remember the specifics on lighting the pilot light, but he thought the instructions were on the furnace. The only thing I saw on the inside of the furnace panel was a detailed diagram of circuitry.

        The sun was setting. I knew it would get colder, but how cold? I checked the weather forecast.  The lowest nighttime temperature until John got home would be 45 degrees. That’s well above freezing, and inside the house would be warmer. I decided that I’d just tough it out and wait six days for John to get home. We’ve got a wood stove, and I had a space heater that Sarah had brought home from college.

        One last time before bed, I tried, without any success. I ran the space heater for a half hour, added another quilt to the bed, and settled in for the night.  

        Then I laid there fretting. The later into the night it got, the worse my “what ifs” got. I was warm, but what if the animals weren’t? Suzie’s fur is very short and she’s prone to shivering when she gets cold. T-bone’s fur is thick and pretty long, but he’s old and arthritic. The cats have fur coats, but they’re not very big. Then I remembered that Pippin used to LIVE outside fulltime. The fish and the turtle would be OK as long as we didn’t lose power because they have heaters in their tanks. I knew I was being ridiculous, but what if?

        At 2 am I turned the lamp on and read a book for a half hour. At 5 am I coaxed myself to stay in bed until 6:00. At 6:00 I convinced myself to stay in bed until I could see sunlight. At 7:00 I got up. It was 61 degrees. I decided I was calling a furnace man. 
       
At 7:30 I started a fire in the wood stove. At 9:00 I called my friend Carol to ask her for her furnace man’s name and number.

        I called and he asked me if the furnace was my primary source of heat. I said yes. He told me he had a few jobs ahead of me, but he’d fit me in as soon as possible. In the meantime, “bundle up.”

        That’s when I did the totally logical thing. I went into a cleaning frenzy. The problem was that the furnace is located in and near my favorite junk hiding areas—the laundry room, which is next to the garage, which leads to the basement that used to be like a little studio for guests, or an area for teenagers to hang out in. Now it looks like a hoarder’s paradise. It is stuffed with the contents of two former college apartments, childhood mementos, my long arm quilting machine, and some exercise equipment. Lots of it has been sorted through, thrown out, or donated. Lots still remains.

        I blazed a path through the garage:  the paint cans, moldings, closet doors that will complete the remodel of Sarah’s bedroom. Tools were stored away.  Projects were rearranged. Then I started moving luggage, the rug cleaner, mops, and Christmas decorations out of the storage area where the furnace is. I was feeling good about my progress until I realized that he’d probably have to deal with the thermostat too.

        And that is how the upstairs part of our house got cleaned up too. Suddenly decisions were made about things I’d been waffling on or procrastinating about. Book shelves that I had left near the front door to donate on the next charity pickup got moved to the consolidated mess in the basement. Summer wall hanging quilts got switched out to fall quilts as did the rest of the décor around my house.
       
Things that had been piled up waiting to be put away, finally found their rightful places. Cleared table tops were dusted. I warmed up as I scurried around and couldn’t help but think, “I’m just SO sure the furnace guy cares what my house looks like!”

        As surely as a household crisis always happens when John is out of town, it’s guaranteed that I’ll go cleaning crazy when someone “new” is coming to my house, even if it’s a repairman. But, for all the absurdity, I have to say it definitely looks much better around here, and that sweet hum of warm air flowing from the heating vents sure does feel good!  The pilot light was lit when John got home, and I (along with the animals) slept warm and well!


Laura Keolanui Stark watched over the furnace man’s shoulder and learned how to light the pilot light. She never would’ve figured it out because it involved removing a shield. He fixed it so that all the burners are firing and the pilot light flame is steady. He didn’t even go upstairs, but he did see the basement mess, and observed, “Boy, you’ve got a lot of stuff in here.” Laura can be reached at stark.laura.k@gmail.com.

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