hot water

we drove upstate friday night. it was cold. very, very cold. but when we left the hudson valley, everything changed. no, it didn't get warmer. we watched the little digital readout on the dashboard tell us what the outside was doing and the number for the outside got lower and lower. and lower. the closer we got to the house, the closer to the minus side of things those numbers moved. and somewhere around pineville the outside shifted from the positive world to the negative world. now, i don't know how mr. fahrenheit knew that 0 degrees is the freezing point of human snot, but he did and that's why he put a zero there. sure, plenty of folks threw him over for mr. celsius and his zero at freezing (just so you know, for a while, his zero was the boiling point of water and his hundred was freezing), but something happens to a body when its snot freezes. something momentous. something that should be heralded by a specific and easy to remember number on a thermometer.

but the numbers kept going. we watched the little orange glow say -2 then -4 and finally -7. and you think that snot freezing zero is as close as you can get to death and walk away, but no. so we stepped out into -7. this is a number neither dog understood. neither had experienced in their adventurous lives anything like this. if snot freezes, how far behind is dog poop? i envisioned small dogs so low to the ground they'd be trailing poopsicles from bottoms too frozen to even know what was going on. fortunately, my imagination is slightly more dramatic than real life.

when we stepped into the 45 degree house, it was like walking into a sauna. a tropical island. a 4th floor classroom in a brooklyn high school. we built up the fire and went off to bed draped in dogs and wool blankets. the next morning all six of the degrees above zero we had were welcome. everything was just fine. we survived the night of the minus degrees (some places nearby recorded as low as -21). except... except the hot water in the downstairs bathroom did not seem to want to come out. i don't mean it was cold. usually, it is. it takes about ten minutes to warm up each time you turn it on, so we're already a little hostile to each other, the hot water tap and me. but there was nothing. all the other hot waters worked just fine, which is important because, as you might remember, the brilliant plumber who did work here before the house was ours set the upstairs toilet to run on hot water instead of cold.

but back to the downstairs hot water tap. nothing. the cold tap worked just fine. it didn't seem likely it would be frozen all by itself. the cold pipe ran right next to it. oddly, the cold pipe was scooted a few inches closer to the heat duct for the bathroom than the hot pipe. so the cold pipe was happy. i should take a minute to explain that this little bathroom, mostly a toilet, sink, door and window in a place smaller than any closet in the house is part of an addition. it and the back entryway were built later. there's no basement beneath and the crawlspace set under this little area is too small even for a badger hound to navigate. basically it's a little tiny pocket of frozen air between the frozen ground and the small bathroom. just big enough for the two pipes and the heating duct to squish in two feet or so. nothing more.

so we did what folks do in these situations. we turned on the tap. we opened the cabinet so the heat would scoot in. we even considered a space heater but there was no room to shove it in there. the sweetie checked online so we boiled water and cut up an old towel. the sweetie wrapped the angry pipe with boiling towel strips and still nothing happened. on the way back from breakfast, i asked about those plug in heaters for car engines. minutes later the sweetie came out of the hardware store, the one with the giant biting bird, carrying a clamp light. he had a plan. down in the basement there were several uncomfortable noises and he came back up looking for a board. board in hand, he returned to the world under the house. more awkward sounds, but no water. he came back up cobwebby, looking for another board. he returned to the basement wielding the light clamped onto the two boards screwed together end to end.

he returned to the surface world absolutely sure of himself. i wouldn't have been that worried except that last year there was that magnificent fountain behind our fridge when we found out about an uncapped washing machine hook up. pipes are not our enemies when they freeze. they are out enemies when they thaw. things in the walls that can get to me before i can get to them- pipes, ungrounded wires, squirrels- have become enemies, things to be vanquished. and the sweetie was right. he vanquished the frozen pipe. he is a vanquisher of enemies. which is good because i am really more a knitter of dog sweaters.