Last Thursday I noticed that the toilet was running all the time. You could see the water moving in the toilet bowl day and night. I stopped at the hardware store and bought a new flapper -- the easiest of all possible things to change, but this didn't help. It got worse. Over the next few days I half-heartedly Googled how to fix a running toilet, clicked on a couple of links and stopped reading at "replace the filler valve." Mostly I stayed far enough way from the bathroom (except when necessary) to not hear the water run, the water bill inching upward.
And all the time I whined. Not out loud, but in my head to myself alone. Someone has to fix the toilet. Why does that someone have to be me? It's too piddling a job to pay a plumber to make a house call. Why me?
Twenty years ago I'd have sailed right in and done the job, because, well, who else was going to do it? My sainted husband could fix a sentence, but did not have fix-it skills for concrete objects. Back in the day, more than once, I set out to fix something or install something and would get partway through and then have to call my brother-in-law for help. The instructions made sense to me, but there would be a screw I couldn't loosen or something inside the wall that didn't look the picture in the handy home repair book. I probably should not have even tried to set a new toilet in the wax ring on the bathroom floor all by myself.
But I set my face toward that job this afternoon, because my own whining was getting on my nerves. I emptied the toilet tank of water, unscrewed the plastic nuts underneath that held the filler valve in place, and took the old one to the hardware store to get another one just like it. I came home and installed the new one in a matter of minutes, noting that the directions said to "hand-tighten only" those plastic nuts under the toilet tank. So I'll be able to unscrew them myself again next time. The toilet is now flushing properly, is refilling when it is supposed to, and remains silent the rest of the time.
Way too much time was spent complaining, procrastinating, whining, avoiding.
Let me rephrase that: I spent way too much time ... etc. Self-inflicted irritation.
I had been thinking over the weekend about "Lucinda Matlock," from Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology, a collection of poems in which characters from a small rural town in southern Illinois speak from beyond the grave about their lives. The poems make a nice readers' theater piece; I was in such a production at a time in my life when all the youngest women's voices were assigned to me. Lucinda is quite old and this poem was spoken beautifully by an actress who seemed old to me, maybe almost 40. Vocally she imbued it all with memory, recollections of both hardship and joy.
I went to the dances at Chandlerville,
And played snap-out at Winchester.
One time we changed partners,
Driving home in the moonlight of middle June,
And then I found Davis.
We were married and lived together for seventy years,
Enjoying, working, raising the twelve children,
Eight of whom we lost
Ere I had reached the age of sixty.
I spun, I wove, I kept the house, I nursed the sick,
I made the garden, and for holiday
Rambled over the fields where sang the larks,
And by Spoon River gathering many a shell,
And many a flower and medicinal weed —
Shouting to the wooded hills, singing to the green valleys.
At ninety-six I had lived enough, that is all,
And passed to a sweet repose.
What is this I hear of sorrow and weariness,
Anger, discontent and drooping hopes?
Degenerate sons and daughters,
Life is too strong for you —
It takes life to love Life.
I'm pretty sure that if Lucinda were living my life she would have sucked it up and fixed the toilet days ago and then moved on to the next chore or the next neighborly act of service. She'd be rigging new parts for her loom instead of waiting for the fancy ready-made ones to come in the mail (as I am today). Surely the sick she nursed included those eight children she lost. I imagine her steely and resourceful at the bedside, though bent, perhaps, under the crushing grief at their graves. Were they infants, perhaps? A daughter lost in childbirth? A son who was suddenly, gravely injured in the field, or one who died of cancer far too young?
She knew healing: the medicinal weeds she gathered, the singing that restores the soul. But what did she shout to the wooded hills? Maybe that's what she did with what she didn't understand, shouting questions beyond words, getting them out and not expecting an answer in return.
"It takes life to love Life." I remind myself of these words when that lowercase life is not going well, when I am weary and angry or overwhelmed. That big mystery of Life is not full up, not fully lived without remembered happiness and the sweet sorrow that is sometimes our lot in the present.
Also, in the middle of all of life's grandiosity, sometimes you have to get over yourself and do what's yours to do. Fix the toilet.
An hour or two after fixing the toilet, I went on to extract the hair clog from the bathtub drain.
I am Woman, watch me plumb.
