Trouble with the plumber. He was supposed to come some days
ago...
Trouble with the plumber. He was supposed to come some days
ago and plumb a tub in the house on a Somerville hill we’ve been working on.
But he keeps not coming and the woman who lives there has been left without a
place to bathe for two days now, left instead with a dark-wooded scar in her
bathroom where we amputated an old tub which had leaked for who knows how long
and wrecked wall and ceiling below.
To make up for it, M. and I showed up yesterday morning with
snow shovels and spent the first hours of the day shoveling the driveway.
Another seventeen inches fell over the weekend, and the stretch of drive hadn’t
been touched. We heaved shovelfuls on plow mountains and cleared the drive and
made paths to doors and cleaned sets of steps to porches. Shoveling is not
carpentry. Shoveling would not make the plumber appear. But a couple of hours
of snow removal was, in this case, a simple gesture and a right act to make up
for delays unexpected.
