As I applied a rich mahogany stain to the porch stairs of our flood-renovated cottage in England, a workman scraping ivy-covered walls nearby suddenly asked, "What was the stupidest thing you've ever done -- and gotten away with?"
Oh, boy. What a fascinating question. Doing boring, repetitive stuff, like scraping and staining, gives birth to interesting conversation.
I stared at the guy, nibbled my lip, then grinned. That one was easy.
"Well, one summer day about 20 years ago, while the kids were at school, I decided to clean the master bedroom in our newly remodeled home ..."
I'd dusted, vacuumed and generally alarmed a lot of dust bunnies. Then, inspired, I decided to change our king-sized waterbed's water. It had been about five years.
Humming, I connected the hose to the stripped bed, threw the end out the window, and, 20 minutes later, the mattress sagged into a fat mound of wrinkles. Efficiently I reeled in the hose, walked it to the bathroom down the hall, and attached it to the faucet. Cold, clean water flowed back into the collapsed vinyl; in about 20 minutes, I'd have a fresh bed.
A few minutes later, the phone rang downstairs. My sister in California babbled a frightening story. She'd been making lunch in their ranch kitchen in the hills just outside Santa Barbara, when an odd movement caught her eye; a huge rattlesnake was crawling cautiously over the stone floor about seven feet away! The front door was open, and it had slithered through. Horrified, she screamed, causing her husband, writing a business report on the veranda, to rush in. He grasped the situation instantly. "Get up on the counter, then don't move! I'll be right back!" "Dee," she said, tearfully, "I've never moved so fast in my life. I flew up there, and it watched me! It watched me! Thirty minutes later I'm still finding it hard to breathe ... Robin came back in with a shovel and chopped the snake's head off, but the fangs kept reflexively biting air; the mess in here is incredible. My legs wouldn't work; Robin had to help me down. If the kids had been here ..." She began to cry.
Trying to calm her I explained what I was doing, and then -- I froze. Terror nearly overwhelmed me. Water ... bed ... maybe 60 minutes gone, and counting ...
Screaming, I dropped the phone, and shot up the stairs into a nightmare; the tortured, seam-stretched, bulging mattress LOOMED above me, an immense balloon trying to touch the ceiling. The old floor creaked under the enormous weight... Panting with fright I flew to the bathroom, shut off the faucet, detached the hose, rushed the nozzle to the bedroom window and began releasing the water. The kitchen, underneath, was seconds from disaster; our 150-year-old brick farmhouse was sturdy, but THIS was surely too much.
Draining that bed was an agonizingly slow process. Time was a snail. I didn't breathe for 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, my sister dangled; the phone squawked distantly downstairs while I stared, hypnotized, at the monster. Any second the floor would collapse -- any second.
Finally, a lifetime later, I inched delicately past the sagging, exhausted mattress, softly, softly crept downstairs to the phone, and spoke in a whisper, certain ANY vibration -- any disturbance at all -- would bring the house down. My frantic sister's relief was tremendous; I'd explained just enough before dropping the phone for her to piece together what had probably happened. Together we cried, and laughed, realizing how lucky we were. I trembled for hours.
That afternoon, impossibly, an inspector pronounced the floor sound.
Dee Blair's Sunnybank Gardens are at 325 Sixth St. in Traverse City. Visit her Web site, www.deeblair.com for more information. Find more of her columns online at record-eagle.com/deeblair.
