This year, my wife Shana and I are giving each other gutter drainage as a fifteenth anniversary present.

We did have some slightly more romantic ideas. We’d seen a gorgeous hot air balloon floating over Blue Mountain, and considered taking a ride in one. (Actually, that’s one idea we’d like to pursue. If any reader can help put us in touch with these Perry County balloonists, we’d be grateful.)

We’d contemplated taking a course together. Cheese-making was a front-runner. Glamorous, no. But practical, fun, and potentially delicious.

There was even the idea of nipping over to Paris for a long weekend. Never really a contender, even factoring in a super-budget airfare. I mean, what’s the point of traveling across the Atlantic Ocean and back if you’re too tired even to hork down a croissant?

Still, it was fun to dream.

Then, a few weeks ago, the skies opened up. It rained buckets. And the old terra cotta drain pipes under our house in Baltimore finally gave up the ghost.

These pipes, which were state of the art in 1913, when the house was built, had lived a long and venerable life. For decades they’d silently done their job, which was basically to move water from the downspouts in the backyard out to the storm drain in the street.

But the house has settled significantly since it was built, aided over the years by the widening of the street out front, and the introduction of trucks and buses, as opposed to cute little underpowered motorcars and the occasional horse and buggy.

Roots, drawn to the pipes by the water running through them, had worked their way through the porous terra cotta.

We’d done everything we could to extend their life, including roto-rootering them out, an operation that reminded me of the movie Fantastic Voyage. Maybe you remember that picture, with its shrunken scientists zooming around inside a man’s body in an itty-bitty submarine. A intriguing concept, made all the more fascinating by the many scenes with Raquel Welch in a skin-tight wet suit.

But I digress.

The point is that watching the plumber work the drain pipe with his roto-tool was like watching a gargantuan angioplasty. He’d run the drill as deep as he could, then haul out mounds of roots. All the while shaking his head in the way that tells the homeowner he’d better gird his wallet for a major expense.

We limped along like that for a few years, but the day of reckoning finally came, in the form of water in the basement. And the pleasant bouquet that inevitably followed.

Luckily, I recently finished a revision of a novel, which meant that I had time to clear my head of literary matters and get my hands dirty. I stood outside at night in monsoon conditions and pinpointed the source of the trouble. I hired gutter guys to do some repair, researched drainage and sump pits, and shopped for PVC pipe.

“Guess what?” I told Shana, “we’re going to have a French drain! French! As in France.”

As in, Paris, City of Light, world epicenter of amour. Where we won’t be going.

Of course, even if you do a lot of the work yourself, there are still expensive materials to buy. Not to mention experts to hire for the really hard stuff.

Which is why the ballooning, cheese-making, and jet-setting is on hold. At least this year.

Not to worry. When our anniversary rolls around, I’m sure we’ll find some romance—perhaps not with a capital “R,” but romance nonetheless. There have been plenty of years when our gifts to each other have been homespun. A collage. A sonnet. A zero-turn mower.

You know, the simple things, the gifts that tend to last.

 

 

 

 

 

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 01 October 2009

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com