Maria and I were talking this morning about the old days of the writers – Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, Updike, Mailer – when women and wives devoted their lives to making sure their husbands had nothing to worry about but their work and their books. The great men didn’t handle money, laundry, shopping or child care. They just worked, their wives handled all of the domestic chores, handled all of the cleaning and cooking and kids.
Great men were supposed to be free think.
Solzhenitsyn’s wife Natasha brought him black bread and coffee while he wrote and picked up pages from his typewriter as they came out and fell to the floor.
Blessedly for most people, those days are gone.
Authors have been pulled off of their pedestals, by life, e-books, feminism and great recessions. I worry about a lot of things besides my work. Maria has no one talking care of her whole life, neither do I. We both have to work around life, and life has a lot to say about everything. Like sewage.
I am better for it, in lots of different ways, but life is also more challenging. The upside is that I have responded by making it work for me, I write about my life as well as my work.
Friday was one of those days where my once sacrosanct work space was violated, and real life descended on me with a passion. Maria and I have never split up chores in a formal way, but septic matters, like shopping and cooking, seem to fall under my jurisdiction. My grandmother warned me repeatedly about marrying a gentile woman, they don’t care about cooking or cleaning, she said. Since she didn’t know any gentiles, I wasn’t sure she knew what she was talking about, but I see now that she did have a point.
Alexandr Solzhenitsyn would have had a stroke if a whole work day was obliterated by sewage. The septic is right outside my study window, you don’t get much good writing done with a tractor digging holes 10 feet from the computer.
We have an old farmhouse with a septic sewage system – a tank buried in the back yard. It is a small ceramic tank, actually two small tanks attached to one another. It takes a couple of years to fill up. But you never really know when that is about to happen. We have learned that when the toilets flush and we hear a gurgling sound, that means the tanks are filling up and beginning to back up in the pipes.
Near as we can tell – it is not an exact science – we have about a week to get the septic pumped before the sewage backs up into the house. In my Iphone contacts list are the Snells of Greenwich, N.Y., they have been doing septic work for eons, you call Grace, the matriarch up at home and chat with her for a bit – “well, honey, if it’s gurgling, we better come out and take a look. You don’t want surprises on Thanksgiving Day!” No, we do not want those kind of surprises on any day.
Grace said she would send her son Harold out (he has three Welsh Corgis who ride around in his truck with him) in a day or so, if the gurgling in the pipes get worse, “call me right away.” Harold and company showed up Friday, the tank was, in fact, very full. He suggested that we put two “risers” in so that they could just attach their hoses to the pump in the future, they wouldn’t have to dig it up and would always know just where the tank was. The risers sit a bit above ground, Maria is already plotting to put something attractive over them.
The pumping would be easier and a lot cheaper. We agreed, even though this made it a $900 day when all was said and done, our budget for December was blown. The pumping is pretty cheap – between $200 and $300, the risers cost twice that.
Harold loved Fate and Red, took photos of them, and I did some sheepherding with the two of them, they were much impressed by the border collies. Harold took home some photos of the dogs and some of my books, signed to his wife Tracy. He hopes to bring her back to see the dogs work herself, she loves dogs.
Harold had it all wrapped up around 2 p.m. my sweet morning work time was shot. John Updike would not have given up his morning writing hours to deal with sewage I grumbled to Maria. Oh, she said, eyebrow rising dangerously. “Who do you think might have handled it?”
I dropped the subject.
Maria does a lot of things around the farmhouse and the farm, but she has had enough sewage and restoration work in her lifetime. She is not domestic and very proud of it. I noticed she vanished into her studio the second Harold showed up with his truck, and was not seen again until he was gone.
Still, we had a good time, about as much fun as one can have pumping a septic tank. It is good not to hear gurgling when the toilets flush, good to new that when he shows up next, he’ll be out in a flash.