Water, water

This morning when I opened the laundry room door to let out the cat (who otherwise wakes us up in the middle of the night), I found the floor was partially covered with water. The cat was not happy. I suspected it was the sump pump, but I checked the laundry sink, too. No, it appeared to be the sump pump, the second time it's given out in the last two months.

I got old towels and threw them on top of the puddles. Every time we have sump pump trouble I think to myself, my next house will be on a hill. No water in the basement. Of course being on a hill has its own challenges, especially when it snows. Or when you have to cut the grass.

The house I grew up in in Connecticut was on a hill. A little hill, but our house was considerably higher than all the other houses on the street. The reason for the hill was a giant rock. Connecticut is full of rocks, everywhere you go you see fences made of rocks that people have dug up. Our driveway was on a slant and after you got to the top of the drive, you had to climb a long set of stairs to get to the front door.

There's a limited number of plants that you can grow on a rock. We had a thin layer of dirt, so we had a lawn, and some rock-loving plants. My father who had always had a vegetable and flower garden had to give that up when we moved to this house. It was a beautiful setting, though. We were surrounded on three sides by woods. Our back yard dropped off into the woods and was ringed by tall, old trees, hickories and elms.

The basement, or cellar as we call them in Connecticut, was only half a basement because the giant rock took up the other half. Anyone remember the old Dick van Dyke Show? The episode where Rob and Laura are house shopping in New Rochelle, New York (not that far from where we lived) and they find that there's a rock sticking up in one corner of the family room in the basement? Theirs was a ROCK, naked. Our half-a-cellar worth of rock was cemented over so that we had a crawl space for that part of the cellar. It still made a good story.

This afternoon the sump pump came back on as my husband was moving stuff to get to it. We're still damp and the future of the sump pump is a mystery.