I was sure I smelled a gas leak one recent Sunday morning as I was walking down our driveway, but after checking out the obvious culprits, the smell was gone. I convinced Mike to come outside and sniff around with me, just in case. We wandered around the yard, noses scrunched up, taking in big gulps of air like bears smelling fresh bacon. Nothing. We shrugged and went back inside.
Monday morning, I caught a whiff of it as I walked outside. And then it was gone. But the thought of our house blowing up or a spark setting off a fire pushed me to call the gas company, just in case I wasn’t imagining it.
A few hours later, Mike called me at work. I wasn’t imagining it. We had a leak in our main line, somewhere around the base of the giant pine tree in our front yard. Maybe the heavy snow from the recent storm shifted the tree and broke the pipe. Whatever the cause, the gas was shut off and the meter removed. No hot water or heat until the leak got fixed. Now we had a new problem — figuring out how to replace the line. We started calling plumbers and searching for someone to dig up our rocky front yard.
When you’ve been married for almost 25 years, you’ve weathered a few storms, both figuratively and literally. We’ve logged quality time in our basement hiding from tornadoes in Minnesota. We’ve had a basement flood when a sump pump failed, and dealt with roofs damaged by hail. We spent three weeks without power after a massive ice storm in Canada, sleeping in the basement by the wood stove. This tree-gas line disaster was just another reminder from Mother Nature that our comfortable lives can be upended in a matter of minutes.
I could fill another column with all the things that went right and wrong as we tried to fix our gas leak. We replaced the section of pipe by the giant tree, but it was still leaking somewhere farther up the line. More digging. We rented a cement saw and cut through the sidewalk that ran the length of the house to replace the rest of the gas line. We hauled 600 pounds of broken cement to the dump. We dug a deep trench with a tool we rented from a guy who warned us beforehand that it was so terrible we’d regret renting it. He was right. But it got the job done and we kept all our fingers and toes.
Beyond the hard work of having to dig up the yard, we realized how much we take for granted each day. It took a few days for me to stop turning on the hot water tap at the sink. We borrowed space heaters to warm up the house, but woke to chilly mornings because we didn’t trust leaving them on overnight. We boiled water to bathe or drove to my dad’s house to steal his hot water. One evening, after watching us cut through the sidewalk and dig our trench, our neighbors invited us over for pizza, beer and a hot shower!
Finally, after 11 days, the new gas line was in. Turns out we had a small leak in the basement, so that was fixed too. Thursday night when I got home from work, the house was warm. Mike filled the kitchen sink with hot, soapy water and we did the dishes. I threw in some laundry. And then I soaked in the tub for a solid hour and thought about how much we have been given and how grateful I am to have it.