Easter Floods

Not like rain floods, more like basement floods. Nobody ever goes into the basement up at the big house anymore just the kids when they are playing down there. Fortunately on Friday someone did. A pipe to an outside hydrant was leaking into the basement. Not inches of water but a slowly saturating spread. Of course the kids still had stuff in their bedrooms down there, this time by kids I mean my husband and his sisters. Who ever moves out and actually takes everything with? My husbands former room was hit the worst and of course he had the most stuff still there. Unfortunately mostly books, his collectors edition hard covers and very old books from his grandparents and other family. He’s the only one I’ve ever met who is as obsessed with books as I am.

He and his sister set to work cleaning out the basement, vacuuming up as much water as they could, setting up fans, rolling up carpet and hauling stuff out. We hauled two very full pickup loads to the dump and rushed the books to the only place we had room to spread them out, the playhouse. As I loaded soaking old books on to the table I couldn’t help but glance through. There was a happy birthday 1911 inside the front cover of one and, I haven’t gotten to read it over thoroughly, but what looks like a tax paper listing all of his grandpas assets from the fifties or sixties if I remember correctly. These are treasures that need to be saved. And we are working on it, they are damaged for sure but salvageable, only one that was so completely soaked it doesn’t show any sign of drying.

That took a couple of days and the job isn’t done yet. But it was Easter! So we stopped to celebrate. The Easter bunny paid a visit and brought lots of candy. No potatoes got planted but food was eaten and eggs hidden. Not dyed, they experimented with fake eggs that unfortunately wouldn’t take color. I thought that was the whole point? Why make fake eggs to color that won’t color? But other than slowing the fun down a bit, and we just had other fun while that got worked out anyway, it didn’t bother anything at all. We just got out the markers.

We had dyed our soon to be deviled eggs the the night before anyway.