It was a Blessing and a Pain in the Ass

Men at work in my mom's kitchen.

In January I rented my mom and dad's dormant, frozen-in-time house to my nephew. He was ready to move out on his own but didn't have much income. So, I cut him a temporary deal until he could get himself established. He has always mowed the yard, trimmed the hedge, and kept the swimming pool maintained anyway. My dad used to pay him a little money for his help. I continued to pay him since dad's stroke. Now that work is part of his rent.

Recently, he told me one of the toilets was not flushing properly. I drove over and checked it out the next day. I tried a plunger just to see what it did. Nothing. I called the plumber Jennifer and I use for everything. Because we use him for everything and pay him every time, he worked me in fairly quickly. It took a few days. He's a busy guy and plumbing is almost always an emergency for somebody.

Before he could work it in my nephew added that the kitchen sink was not draining properly either. So, I figured the two situations were related since they manifested about the same time. When the plumber arrived a couple of days later he immediately suspected the septic tank.

The house has two baths and one of them was working fine but, we discovered, it was merely backing up into the drain line and sitting there, slowly emptying into the septic tank. The same toilet was an issue at the end of January. At that time the problem was the septic tank as well. The plumber and his assistant hand dug down to the cast iron line feeding in to the septic tank and found it partially disconnected from the tank and blocked with various roots. This is the type of stuff he sees all the time. He cleared the roots and put an adapter in place to secure the connection.

For round two he dug there again only this time he uncovered the lid on the tank and opened it. Sure enough, the “T” pipe inside the tank was almost completely blocked. It was cast iron but over sixty years old and it had just about rusted away. He replaced it with a PVC fitting and everything checked out...or so we thought.

My nephew soon reported that, while the toilet was flushing fine, the kitchen sink was still an issue. I felt stupid because I never thought to check the sink. I just had it in my mind that if we fixed the toilet then the sink would drain too. But that was not the case. My bad.

The plumber felt bad about not checking the sink himself so he worked me in first thing the next morning. I was waiting on them when he arrived with his assistant. We were all expecting a plunger would work the clog out. But several attempts yielded no results. The sink still was not draining properly.

My plumber asked: “You have a graywater line?” At first, I did not know what he was talking about. I'd never heard that word before. Graywater. I guessed that he meant what my family called a “field line.” I told him the laundry and laundry room shower were hooked to one but I didn't know very much about the plumbing of the house. I didn't know where the sink drained.

Turns out there was a standard PVC fitting from the kitchen sink that directed the water away from the septic tank. About two-thirds of the way across the width under my mom and dad's house the PVC was stuffed into a two-inch rubber hose, which took the water rest of the distance to the field line. So the kitchen sink had nothing to do with the septic tank. My bad again.

There was a sag in the drain where the PVC entered the rubber piping. That was probably blocked with cooking grease, the way my parents ate and most of my family still eats. Greasy food tastes best! I love bacon, for example. My plumber looked at me a smiled, “I always say you can tell a lot about people's arteries by looking at their pipes. And I thought that was a wise way to look at it.

His assistant raised the sag under the house about six inches or so, tacking with support to a floor joust. The drain otherwise had a perfect tilt to the field line. But there was still the matter of the blockage. No one saw what was in that pipe but it was probably grease.

The plumber brought out his auger and ran that half-inch lengthy roto-rooter all the way through where those two pipes connected under the house. He pulled it back just short of the field line, judging distance by the length of the flopping contraption. As it was rewinding itself he said, “I'll never have to worry about it rusting.” And that's true. There was the wetness of grease on a good stretch of it toward the end. Nothing will ever rust through that, especially when he keeps coating the thing a little more with each deployment.

After that the kitchen sink drained fine. It is good that I have to struggle with this sort of stuff. I get all wrapped up in my high falutin musings and my passion for Art and Nature and it is easy to become unmoored from ordinary life. Having plumbing problems will ground you. Everything that really matters becomes very obvious and very mundane. Nothing will ground you like the mundane, the basic earthy needs, what Nietzsche called “the closest things.”

So, it was a pain in the ass and a blessing. It was also an incredibly unlikely situation. What are the odds of my mom's toilet and the kitchen sink, tied to unrelated drain lines, clogging more or less simultaneously after all these decades? Aren't I a lucky one to have to deal with it!

My plumber says he sometimes has a “shitty job.” He laughs a good-natured laugh. I can laugh at it all too, now, days after the fact, when the annoyance of it diffused into my general sense of humor. I tend to worry about things a lot. This problem at my parents' house weighed on me. But I also laugh at a lot things. Laughter and anxiety are a strange combination and somewhat inversely proportional to one another. Like yin and yang.  I suspect I'd worry a lot more if I started laughing less. So, yeah, this was a rather strange but humorous place to find myself for a couple of days. Shitty job. Hahahaha!

(Written without AI assistance.)