What now you may ask?

Water, water everwhere, nor any drop to drink.
Water, water everywhere, and MY how it doth stink!

Yes, dear readers, I have been wet vaccing in the basement, three times a day. Ah, the glamor of it all. But the song "Workin' in a Coal mine, goin' down down down" Keeps floating through my brain, which sort of takes the onus off.

And moving furniture to polish my wood floors and my kitchen floor. Climbing on stools, reaching above my head to get books off the shelves so that I could Murphy's oil then lemon oil all the wood. Hey. I mop n glo'ed with a TOOTH Brush to get around the wood of the banisters. Somewhere in the last two weeks, the nasty little demon in charge of turning perfectly sloppy women into anal housebodies who walk around with Swiffers singing, "Wake up your room!" (Sorry to you who are younger, it's a line from a simply horrid commercial from the sixties where a bedazzled housewife sang as she dusted, "Wake up your room, wake up your room, with natural wood-scent Pledge.)

Anyway, this disgusting demon told me that I must do the corners. That I must be on my knees getting that waxy build up from the floor, that nameless gray goop that accumulates. And I did.

AND rode my exercise bike.

I would sit at the computer to write and my mind quite simply went, "Duh? Arrr?" Think confused Scooby Doo. Then I had to tutor Adam about rhetorical devices in two essays, by Elie Weisel and Alexander Solzhenitzen. And then come home early from his house to wet vac the basement again.

My house is once again officially on the market. I look over the last year and realize that nothing has changed except me. My financial situation remains precarious, but the fight for social security is done. That brought me a peace I cannot measure.  I go through weeks like the last two and continue to accomplish what should be impossible for my back to bear, but I do it... and my back cannot bear it so I pay dearly.

However, then I come out of the payback and there is humor. THAT is the change. I rediscovered my sense of the absurd and my sense of proportion and perspective.  And somewhere or other, I've lost the ability to worry about it all. A loss for which I am grateful beyond words.

Truth be told, the last two weeks have been simply horrible. I could not walk yesterday more than about five steps at a time. When I say I could not walk, it is a literal comment. I had to hold onto things or I collapsed. The pain has been beyond my ability to cope at times.  I could not stand up straight no matter HOW I tried.

I finally took this as a sign that perhaps it was time to lie down, although I did not read the sign until I'd been up stumbling around with a Swiffer and my can of Pledge for an hour. There is no twelve-step program for stupidity. Not really.  I've been looking... obsessively of course.

All I wanted to do was write a little story about my travels to Red Bank. My part two of what could be a freaking novelette, probably. But those words do not come just now. Too much sludge and not enough metaphor just now.

Hey, but  I DO remember the winter after my husband walked out.  It was the only other time my basement flooded. Only then it was so bad that we had lovely little waterfalls falling out of the fireplace, glistening in the light. The water was deep enough so you could hear the splash. I had thought of turning the heat off altogether and perhaps having an indoor rink. I had a sign on my front door that said, "Welcome to Cliffwood Falls." (Cliffwood Drive is the street.)

I was determined to succeed, however. I had survived the hundred year old oak falling in the middle of the night three days after Mark left. I didn't ask for his help then. No. I was mighty. I would handle this on my own. A shop vac. I can just vacuum this stuff right up. I'll get me one of them.

Now, ya gotta understand that on those dumb tests where they determine what your aptitudes are, I was in the bottom twelfth percentile for mechanical ability. When I went off to college it took me FIFTEEN minutes of experimentation before I gave up and asked someone to show me how to use one o' them old-fashioned hand held silver can openers. To this day, it takes me two tries to use my nice slick Scandinavian black hand-held can opener to remember how it works.

So for me to go to Sears and buy  myself a shop vac, come home and put it together all by myself? Please. Applaud. Bow before me. I did it. I READ the directions and laid out all the little pieces and put it together without a hitch. I broke for dinner, but had it done before the eleven o'clock news. And it WORKED.  And I think I had to put together at least eighteen, maybe even TWENTY moving parts.

After the fourth day of using the thing three times a day, and hauling it out the garage to dump it, Mark happened to call and ask whether I could use some help that night. His mom had told him about the water. I was going to say "no" but for once in my life, realized that pride is just, plain, stupidity sometimes. He came over and went downstairs and did a long stint. I went down  after an hour to ask if he wanted some supper, and he was busy swearing at the machine because he could not move it over its own wire.

I said, "Mark, it's super full and is sloshing out the top, you gotta be caref--"

He tipped over the sixty gallons and it flew all over the only parts of the carpet that had remained dry. Black, stinky water.  It also got me in the face as well.  I started to sing, "Old black water, keep on rollin'." And then I wailed, "Well keep on Shinin' your light, gonna make EVERYTHING, pretty mama, gonna make everything all right. And I ain't got no worries, cause I ain't in no hurry... at all!" (Doobie Brothers, some time in the early seventies)

Mark looked at me, silent, my giraffe of an ex husband, a hint of a smirk playing at the corners of his straight lips. "Well. My work here is done. I always have known JUST what to do to make things right. Care to throw the Hoover upright Beats as it Sweeps at my head again?"

The memory of my heaving that at his head, there in that very spot in the basement, when I got him to admit he was NOT considering staying but had been waiting to leave until the kids left... the memory of my having the strength to do it, the look of surprise on his face.

The laughter came, to the point where we sat on the steps and held one another until the tears came. At which point I got up and said, "NO MORE WATER!"

***

And these are the things that leap and cavort through my brain as I slog on through this business of "getting the house ready to show."

• It is not a tsunami in my basement. It's annoying yuck.  
• I am alive, and my home is fine. And my back is better today, so I was able to pretend I was born to polish again today.
• I rode my bike for an hour and a half, singing rock and roll the whole time.
• I have money to pay my bills.
• In these times, in this country? I have everything I could possibly need.

Well. Except, perhaps, a brain capable of coherent thought. I wrote tonight because I was sick of NOT writing. It's what I do, how I enter the world. And bad or good, specious or profound, I write what happens in my little teeny world. The sign that last year is behind me for real is the fact that I am willing to blither publicly, to share how I DO process this life.

Today I move through sludge. Tomorrow I fly. One day I throw a vacuum cleaner at my ex's head. Another I stick a fondu fork through my hand. One never knows.

***
That's what I loved about the Jersey shore. You could run into someone who looked like Burt Lancaster one day and sounded like a dockworker, and then be approached by someone who clearly was stuck in "Stayin' Alive," wearing speedos, gold chains that glistened here and there, lost in the fur blanket of his chest, with the short-sleeved shirt buttoned by one button, straining over the not-twenty-year-old belly ... the man who would walk the forty yards to where you  had clearly removed yourself to draw and sit on the rocks, who huffed and puffed his way there to say, "Youse look like ya need company. I got a porsche wit cher name on it."

And I would think, "Why me? Am I wearing that sign again?"

I just wanted to write about my adventures, but nope. For now, my life is wet vaccs, mops, and chasing dust rhinos around my house.

Just wanted you all to know I am here and I Miss my blogging and others' blogging. Sometimes real life--SURREAL life will intrude.

Forgive this entry, if you can. Perhaps tomorrow I can write about the forking incident--although, perhaps I already have. I'll check.

If you celebrated St. Patrick's Day, I hope you had fun. If you did not, I hope the same. For now? I think Jeannette needs to sleep. Perhaps, in the night, the tooth fairy will, since she has no further business with me, find my brain and leave it under my pillow. One can hope.