IT NEVER RAINS IT POURS!!

You know that old idiom "it never rains it pours"? Well that was the week that was around our house very recently. Figuratively and literally. I couldn't help but feel like we were getting dumped on. Maybe more than a little bit. At least more than our share, anyway.


The first thing to go was our kitchen faucet. For some reason the darn thing decided to leak for a while oozing an undetected stream of water into the bottom cupboard where it was then sucked up into the particle board material that the cupboards were made of which created an odour similar to a feed lot or something. Yuuccck! To some, a feedlot smells like money, to me, it smells like…well, a feedlot, if you catch my drift. Not a great smell if you ask me. It took a while to detect the oozing stink-making culprit and by then the tap had thankfully given up the complete ghost. Strike one.

It was only a couple of days later when a big wind, (tiny twister?) came through our yard knocking down one of our trees which then pulled the SaskPower line connected to the house off of the wall. The live line was coiled up on the wet grass ready to fry any intruder when our quick-thinking town foreman, and our next door neighbour Kelly Kish, surrounded our house with caution tape making it look like a crime scene but keeping anyone in danger away. Thanks Kelly.

Through the quick response efforts of electrician Norm Pander, his assistant and the SaskPower boys we had power back on to the house in record time. That was the good news. The bad news is that the power hook-up was Grandfathered Electrical code but because the old way isn’t good enough any more we have to completely upgrade the power coming in to the house. That’s the bad news and strike two.

Sidebar here: a quick thank you to Benny Baker for quickly cutting up the damaged tree and to Bob Balogh for taking out all of the branches so we were cleaned up by supper time. Thanks guys. Oh yeah, by the way, thanks also to Linus Blackstock for, once again, finishing up another one of my home plumbing projects. This may be the fourth or fifth or sixth time I’ve had to call him in when one of my repair jobs has gone awry. Next time I’ll heed your words, “No more plumbing for you!”

After the trees were cleaned up and the power line reattached the rains came again and lo and behold if there wasn’t rainwater pouring in through a couple of windows. “What the deuce?”, or words to that effect, I asked. Apparently, this past winter’s record breaking icicles and ice dams had put some extra weight on the eavestroughing rendering them useless as the rain water flowing off of the roof fell in between the eavestroughs and the fascia board and poured into the windows. Strike three.

They also say that things come in threes and I was expecting that the above three would be good enough. But, as it turns out, all of these things happened on or before the 20th of June, and, fortunately, they could all be fixed. Unfortunately, on the morning of the 21st of June, the first day of Summer, I received the call that my ailing Mom had passed away. Strike four. And nothing can fix that.

I am grieving but her death put life into perspective for me. Things will go wrong and things will go right and you have to roll with the punches and move forever forward and it will all work out in the end. My mother taught me well.

My Mom went out on her own terms. A life well-lived. And she was full of life until the very end. It is of special note that Mom left twenty-three years to the very day that my Dad left us in 1990. Always in sync those two. It was the first day of Summer. It was their favourite day of the year.

“What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.”-Albert Pike (1809-1891).