soaked

When I was young I remember making umbrellas out of construction paper and our teacher hung them on the classroom wall with the words "April Showers Bring May Flowers." In May we cut tulips and other flowers from the stack of construction paper to replace those umbrellas. The smell of Elmer's Glue brings me back in time...

Spring's a sloppy season for Midwesterners. In a single day we can get snow, sleet, seventy degrees and sunshine, a tornado warning, and torrential rain. And then we'll break for lunch. It's a fool's errand to drive around without a winter coat, sunscreen, umbrella, boots, snow shovel and lawn chair handy because you just don't know.

Last weekend I was in Chicago for the Midwest Mystery Conference held at Roosevelt University. I splashed out for a room at the Palmer House and took the Hiawatha from Milwaukee to Union Station for a night on the town. My afternoon train pulled in with plenty of time to visit the Art Institute of Chicago to get my culture on. All week the forecast had called for RAIN, but I woke up Friday to a fresh report of clear skies and balmy weather. What luck! I could pack my backpack sparingly and skip the umbrella!

The art was swell, and I was particularly taken with the bronze sculptures of French political leaders and influencers by Juste-Milieu. Each bronze caricature was clever on its own, but to see ROWS of them! Captivated, I studied them for quite some time. Of course I visited the miniatures and gasped as one does over the vast collection of Impressionist art. It's my favorite style of art, the use of light and shadow and shading and color and the way the different artists worked together and learned from one another has always fascinated me. Tulips were beginning to bloom in one outdoor bed as I strolled back to the Palmer House, enchanted as I always am by the architecture in Chicago. What a city!

It's easy to imagine who'd be the subject of Juste-Milieu if he were still alive today, non?

The conference was the ideal combination of inspiring and informative, my sole disappointment was not scoring copies of Amaran Gowani's Leverage or Rob D. Smith's Good-Looking Ugly, but always good to see authors sell out their stock, right? I heard Samira Ahmed speak twice, met Florenza Lee, sat with Tracey S Phillips, and got to tell Tracy Clark I admire her work. Then I bolted from my seat so I wouldn't miss my train back to Milwaukee.

Sunday brought the aforementioned mix of weather (pounding rain, thunderstorms, balmy skies, blustery wind, etc.) so I installed some window screens and opened up the house in between the storms. This morning shone with promise. Birds sang, green shoots of grass and bulbs brightened the landscape, it finally felt warm enough to go barefoot and turn off the heat while I opened the windows. Screen door and porch season IS my favorite. Bring on the lilacs! Fish for white bass! Swat at newly hatched flies! I fully expected to spend some time writing and catching up with emails before heading outside, just as soon as my favorite plumber showed up to inspect our sump pump.

I mentioned the rain's been torrential, right? We have a battery back up for the sump pump, and yesterday D informed me it kept going off. He called our plumber, asked if he'd stop through today to check out the system. I agreed to be home when AP (AKA "Awesome Plumber") arrived, and planned to leave for a hike as soon as he told me everything looked good, assuming it was just a little switch or whatever making the beeping noise. Look at this view of my porch! Serenity and peace today!

What possessed me to go downstairs an hour ago? I heard a strange sound, like rushing water. Nothing in our basement makes that noise. I gratefully acknowledged the sewer lift pump appeared to be in working order before discerning the sound came from the other end of our basement...the sump pump zone. As I walked across the carpet, my feet became cool, then damp, then splashed and squelched the remaining distance to the closet door which I opened to discover water SPRAYING from the top of our sump pump! (Actually, it was spraying from a pipe that had burst ABOVE the sump pump, but there was a lot of water and I kind of panicked at the initial sight.)

Obviously my first phone call was to AP, who was on his way after finishing a job. I explained the cause for my panic (because I trusted he'd show up eventually) and he said, "Yes, the water will spray out like that." I quickly clarified the cause for my concern, "No, it's spraying out INSIDE the house." After dithering around for a few minutes, I remembered about electricity and the fuse box and switched off power to the sump pump so at least the water only dripped and seeped inside instead of erupting like it was coming from a fire hydrant. I dragged our enormous Ultimate Sacks out of the immediate range of water crawling across our basement carpet. My peaceful day turned to chaos as I surveyed the damage.

Longtime friends know "I have a guy for that." It's true. I have a binder full of men to call for all kinds of occasions. Need a plumber? Heating and cooling guy? Electrician? Handyman? Someone to do body work on your car? Someone to build you a custom piece of furniture? (Men! They're not purely decorative, they can do useful things, too!) I kid. Kind of. I actually do have a guy for almost everything, but today I added one more to my contacts. AP asked if I had a guy to suck the water out of our carpet. You see, before we finished our basement ten years ago, we installed a new sump pump with battery back up, and any time water encroached, I simply rolled up the carpet scraps we'd laid down on the bare concrete floor, dragged them outside to dry, and mopped up the concrete. No biggie. Turns out I did not have a guy to suck water out of my basement carpet. I never needed one before today.

Huzzah! AP gave me a new name, I have a new guy to recommend to all my friends, and (best news of all!) he'll be here after lunch, which is perfect timing because now I have a new sump pump with new battery back up in place and we're supposed to get thunderstorms this evening.

It's the little things, right?

Spill it, reader. What silver lining have you found in a rain cloud lately?