Ordinary Troubles

There's one way to come out of the Covid funk - wait for your fridge to explode. Nothing like water running down walls, through floorboards, into the basement to make you reach for your phone to let a stranger into the house in the middle of a global crisis.

Thank goodness for mishaps we know how to cope with. The kind that has hundreds of YouTube videos. The kind that afflicts your belongings and not your organs. The kind that has a solution.

Grateful for the small mercies.

At another time, we would have been wailing about the damage to the floor and ceiling. Now we are like, eh, it will dry in due course.

Perspective is a good thing.

In the end, the pan-demic in the kitchen - literally, using pans to collect water - lasted 48 hours from the initial drip to the ceiling bulging with water. It seemed like an eternity. The choices - who needs a fridge to we need a new fridge now! - gave us whiplash.

This crisis reminded me of my grandma's kitchen. Mami didn't have a fridge. Her go-to guy, Damri Chacha we fondly called him, shopped for her daily and the two of them spent hours in the kitchen whipping up deliciousness. For a pantry, Mami used a wooden cupboard with mesh doors and legs that sat in bowls of water. Think about the ingenuity of this. What was the safest way of keeping tropical creepy crawlies at bay from the desserts and non-perishables in the cupboard? Put. The. Legs. In. Water.

My grandma's generation deserved a prize for innovation.

For a while this weekend, I lamented not bringing Mami's cupboard with me to the US. Who'd need a fridge if I had that?! Then I looked in the fridge that was exploding and realized it has been stocked for...wait...a pandemic. Dear God. We need a fridge!

Long story short, the pipe that connects the water line to the ice maker had a gash and was spewing a sharp jet with enough force to knock out yours truly. We were spared by Jed the repairman, who appeared like an angel at the appointed time and turned off the water valve in an impossible to reach spot.

I would say, "Sheesh". Instead, we send a shoutout to Jed who bravely works on rescuing hapless people like us. And we give thanks for ordinary troubles in extraordinary times.