Ending the winter of my discontent

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It's not as if I wasn't warned ahead of time. On Dec. 13, 2013, a contrite man stood telling me that the rod and gun club my husband had booked for the staff Christmas party would not be able to accommodate our 50-plus guests.

"What? I can't believe this!" I sat in the truck with a load of Crock-Pots and drinks in the back seat. "What do you mean we can't use the hall? I've got people coming in an hour!"

"The water's froze up, lady. We weren't expecting it so soon this winter. It's been awful cold, you know."

I was relieved. "Oh, I don't need water," I blundered on. "I'll take everything back home and clean it when we're done. We have plenty of drinks. We won't need to turn on the tap. We've even brought our own wood." I must have sounded slightly hysterical to him, but he didn't seem to care that I might break down in tears at any second.

"That's not the problem, lady. It's the other end you don't have. The sewer line is frozen up and without that you're stuck."

Happy Easter from all of us at NCR!

Well, that last word was the bleeped edition of what he really said, but I took no offense because that old English word was exactly what I was.

My husband held on to his rationality and quickly found another place for our party, where things like toilets flushed freely. But it was only the beginning.

Slowly, like a plague, we began to hear stories. So-and-so decided to move south for three months; a city north of us asked its residents to let the taps drip slowly all the time; pipes were bursting in a small town to the west of us; folks down our gravel road had a drain company come and shoot something up their pipes that allowed them to live in their house. Another couple moved into a hotel.

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Ending the winter of my discontent