I was minutes away from heading out the door this morning when I received a phone call from my next door neighbor.
“Donna, I hate to tell you, but I think you burst a pipe. Water is pouring from your backyard into ours”.
Lovely.
This isn’t the first time we have had trouble with the pipes, valves and other contraptions in our backyard. Last July we received a similiar phone call from the same neighbor while vacationing in Hawaii. And it’s a tad difficult to fix a leak from 5000 miles away.
So we did what every desperate homeowner does in a pinch – hired the most accessible laborer to repair the damage. It turned out to be our neighbor’s gardener who fixed us up with top of the line thingy majigs and charged us a cool $600 for his trouble.
Ouch.
To sooth our shock we rationalized the excessive price by telling each other “at least we will never have to deal with broken pipes again.”
Cough. Cough.
So….here I was today with water gushing all over my backyard and my neighbor’s backyard, with the excess flowing down our street to boot. I ran outside to turn off the water valves but the leak didn’t stop.
I ran to the front yard to turn off the irrigation valves but the leak didn’t stop. I tried turning off the main water line to our house but the leak didn’t stop. (which, by the way, took me quite some time to figure out where all this stuff was located anyway). In a panic I called my husband.
No answer.
I called again.
Then again.
Then again.
No answer. No answer. No answer.
Can anybody say F-R-U-S-T-R-A-T-I-O-N? All I can say is that it’s a good thing I took two naps yesterday.
Finally I reached him. He came home and waited for last July’s gardener to come remeday our “situation”. About 30 minutes later I happened to glance at a headline that read “How To Stop The Leak”.
Well, isn’t that just the question of the day?
Of course the article was referring to the oil leak off the Gulf. But still.
Which got me thinking: water leaks and oil leaks aren’t the only kind of leaks that need fixing. How about leaking negativity? Or leaking criticism? Or leaking emotional outbursts? Or leaking fear?
Just how do we stop these kinds of leaks?
Because just as surely as my water leak poured over into my neighbor’s yard, these kinds of leaks pour over into the lives of those around us.
Tomorrow I’ll be discussing how we can stop these kinds of leaks.
Until then, just give it some thought…..
