Home sweet %&$#! home

This weekend I went to southern Indiana to open the farmhouse for the summer. My oldest brother was in town, so all 5 of us siblings were getting together at the ol' homestead for a cookout Sunday.

I got into town late Friday night and stayed at my sister's. The plan Saturday was to turn on the water at the house, make my semi-annual trip to Wal-mart to stock up on supplies, clean the house, take a nice hot shower and spend a cozy Saturday night next to the wood stove, listening to jazz on WFPK and writing, the dogs at my feet.

Saturday dawned, and I use that word loosely, December-gray and windy. I finally mustered the energy to head to the farmhouse around 12:30. I couldn't find my keys. Finally, I found them in the ignition, which I'd left turned on the ACC position all night, so my battery was dead.

This, as it turns out, was an omen of things to come.

After my brother-in-law jumped my car, I went to the farmhouse and unloaded my stuff. I headed down to the cellar to shut the valve on the water heater before turning on the water at the meter.

Here's where I start wishing my camera had made it out of my bag. I opened the cellar door (one of those that sits on top of the ground, next to the house, looking like it might just lead to the gates of hell when you open it) and saw water up to the second step from the bottom.

Fuck.

I walked down the steps as far as I could and pushed open the wooden door at the bottom. Wood and miscellaneous debris floated around in 10 inches of water covered with an oil slick from the (long inoperable) oil furnace. The water heater, which normally sits about a foot off the dirt cellar floor, was resting at a precarious angle, its back edge sitting in water.

Double fuck.

I tried to call my sister. No network coverage. AT&T is officially my sworn enemy. I loaded up the dogs and drove to the top of a hill a mile up the road. Her neighbor, she thought, had a pump. She'd try to call him.

I headed to town to get rubber boots. Tall ones. And some coffee. Back home, I tracked down Bubby, my brother who lives next door to the farmhouse, on his lawnmower and asked if he had a submersible pump.

"Yeah," he drawled. "But it don't work. The drain's probly clogged. Did you reach down in there and try to clean it out?"

Here's where I should mention that I have always had an irrational fear of the cellar. As a child, I'd be dispatched to the cellar to retrieve things for dinner, like potatoes or canned vegetables or, way back in the day, lard. As a teenager, when desperate times called for desperate measures, I'd siphon out some of my dad's homemade wine (rocket fuel) from the big barrels.

In all cases, I'd take a deep breath, open the door, dash in, grab what I needed to, and get the hell out before whatever scaly subterranean creature lurking in the dark corners had a chance to grab me with one of its 10 taloned arms. Although I've never actually seen anything more sinister than salamanders, spiders and an occasional mouse down there, I figure that's just the monster's food supply.

The presence of nearly a foot of water covering the floor merely served to introduce the possibility of a tentacled swamp monster living in the cellar. So when Bubby asked if I'd reached in the water to try to clean out the drain with my hand, I responded with an emphatic, "FUCK no I didn't!!"

Long story shorter, I drove to my sister's to get the pump. Brought it back, plugged it in. Nothing. I took the dogs for a walk in the woods to calm down, and for the first time ever, thought about how nice it might just be to tear down the farmhouse, with its aged roof and rotten windows and archaic electrical wiring and monster-spawning cellar, and start all over in a few years. With a farmhouse-inspired cottage, that would have the same real woodwork and big windows, but with a dry, concrete basement, draft-free windows, a real laundry room, screened-in porch....

I drove to town--again--to rent a pump from Home Depot and to buy a powerful monster-repelling flashlight. By then it was dark outside. I took the long way home to swing by a party, where I picked up my niece's house key so I could at least take a hot shower before bed. She was at a fancy new house, with lots of stone and wood, on a bluff overlooking the Ohio River, where a small group of exceedingly friendly people had gathered to watch the big fireworks show in downtown Louisville. I showed up at the front door in my muddy overalls tucked into rubber boots, with my torn flannel shirt and fur- and dirt-covered barn jacket. Her hosts insisted I come in to say hello. I proved that even in southern Indiana, I can redneck up a place.

My sister and brother-in-law ended up coming by to check on the pump and start a fire in the stove for me, but mostly I think just to make sure I didn't abandon hope and head home to Indy.

Today, the water mostly pumped out, Bubby cleaned out the drain and declared the water heater junk (based on the high-water mark halfway up its tank). I turned on the water to discover that the pipes to the washing machine had frozen anyway and were leaking a steady stream of water into the basement (where, at least, it drained).

Picking up limbs in the yard, my sister suggested we pile them on the porch and start a bonfire, then claim it was an accident when the house caught fire. It didn't sound like a bad idea.

Inside, I sat on the hearth by the stove, eating and talking to my family crowding the small living room: Two of my three brothers (Bubby had taken his drain snake and gone home), my sister, their spouses, a nephew, two nieces, a great-niece and several dogs. Almost the whole family. And I thought of all the times last summer that there'd been a similar crowd under the shade trees, and how hard it is to get us all together anywhere else, but how easy it is with the words "Cookout at the farmhouse this weekend."

By the time everybody left we'd made plans to get together there again in a few weeks. My brother-in-law would help me clean out the cellar and haul off the old fuel tanks to sell for scrap, my brother would fix my pipes, and my sister would help me paint the windows and sort stuff to put in a yard sale she's having. They all knew how frustrated I was with the place today and probably guessed I was wondering if it's worth the trouble. Their answer, of course, is that it is.