When we heard a scraping noise followed by a loud hissing sound as we backed down the driveway Sunday afternoon, I knew before Mike stopped the car that it was bad. I was hoping maybe the tire had hit one of the many sharp rocks that line the triangular wedge of land between our house and our next-door neighbors. Maybe one of the tires got ripped open. No such luck. We had knocked the cap off the gas meter and it was blowing full steam ahead, the rotten-egg smell of natural gas filling our noses and the cul-de-sac. For just a second, neither of us knew what to do, other than to shut the car off and get away from the area. As I shakily dialed 911, Mike assured me there was some kind of magical ball valve that kicks in when this type of thing happens, and slows the flow. Not this time. I was glad the operator on the line was calm and told us the fire trucks were heading our way. I was secretly glad that Mike was the one driving and not me. I texted the neighbors a heads-up so they wouldn’t be worried when the emergency vehicles rolled in. We sat on the farthest corner of our front yard, listening to the loud hissing sounds. It’s tough to sit and wait for help. The fire truck arrived quickly and the firefighters shooed us back into the house for safety while they dealt with turning off the pipe. The gas company guy wasn’t far behind them and replaced the valve, but something about the accident must have been the final straw for our furnace. As much as he and Mike tried, it wouldn’t light back up. After he left, we spent a few more hours on it before deciding to get through the night with the electric space heaters our kind neighbors lent us. The next morning, we called a local HVAC company and soon had a warm house again.
The gas incident was the topper to a weekend that hadn’t gone as I had imagined. Saturday we had the crazy idea to organize my office, now that I’m working more from home. We decided a big filing cabinet in my closet would be the perfect solution to help me make the space more usable. Mike showed me one he found for sale online. It looked big, but he had a similar one in his office, so I figured we could haul it ourselves. We drove the truck out to Dewey and gingerly tipped it into the back. It filled the whole bed. Larger than I expected. Getting it out of the truck with the steep angle of our driveway was harder than dropping it in.
I wonder if there’s a single point in your life when you realize your body might be older than you like to imagine it is. As we planned and schemed in the garage about how to get the file cabinet up the two sets of steps on our front porch without killing ourselves, I started to worry we had hit that point. Mike ran through the list of all the things I had to do to make sure neither of us were crushed or the cabinet destroyed (least of my worries). He would go in front and pull on the dolly it was strapped to and I needed to stabilize it as we rolled it over the angled driveway to the stairs and then I would push it from behind at the same second he would yank it up each step. I was pretty sure this was a bad idea. But like many bad ideas we’ve had during our marriage, (the time we tied ourselves together with a rope to break massive ice dams off our roof in Canada), fate was kind to us again. After much coordinated pushing and pulling, a scary cracking sound from one of the porch steps, and a few bruises on my arms, we made it into the house with the beast.
Between the file cabinet, hitting the gas line after 12 years of not hitting it, and fighting with the furnace on a cold winter’s night, it was a long weekend that made us think more about what will happen as we grow older. We live in a house with many stairs and a steep driveway. There are days when the projects we know we should get done can feel overwhelming, but for now, we get through them, one trip to Home Depot at a time. And we are both stubborn and mostly unwilling to ask for help. Much like my grandfather, in his late eighties, who told us one morning of his plans that day to climb a dead tree and hang upside down with a chainsaw to cut it down (we didn’t let him do this), I suspect there will be more graceless aging moments in our future as we push the boundaries of what we should still do. Hopefully, we’ll continue to make it through with only sore muscles and slightly bruised egos.