It only amounted to an hour mopping up with towels, inside and outside the fridge; and as with most close calls, the episode has already receded into an anecdote I can now tell—as when, after swerving to avoid an accident, I am back on my way, my mind already busy with other thoughts than the disaster I have just so narrowly escaped.
In a world where people I don’t know are losing their homes and lives every day in fires, unprecedented deluges and beneath collapsed buildings, I want to remember this close call as possibly the closest I have come in years to jeopardizing my comfortable life.
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A Bit of Background
I had been feeling a sense of accomplishment after successfully replacing the fridge filter, which filters the water for ice cubes, and for on-demand-water and a water jug in the fridge door. A few hours after replacing the filter and turning the spigot behind the fridge back on, I noticed water glistening in the grout lines between the tiles beside the fridge. This problem was simply solved. Turning the spigot a single turn, instead of opening it all the way, stopped the drip.
A few hours later, I noticed a recurrence of an issue that I assume is unrelated to the new water filter, because it has happened periodically over the previous months. The jug in the door of the fridge wasn’t refilling. But, feeling on a roll as a self-reliant householder able to solve problems that come with the electronic and mechanical conveniences of modern life, I decided to solve this problem once and for all.
The jug nestles into it own little indentation in the fridge door and, standing upright, is designed to press a button behind it so that water will flow into the jug as needed to replenish it after each use. Perhaps the button isn’t working all that well, because this doesn’t always happen.
My solution was to fold a piece of tissue and put it under the leading edge of the jug, so that the back of the jug would press more firmly on the button behind it. That worked. After I did this, the jug refilled right away.
The next morning, everything was back to normal and I made a pot of coffee to start the day. As I do every morning, I alternated tasks in my office with visits to the kitchen for more coffee. It was on one of these returns to the kitchen with my empty coffee mug, that I discovered that there was water on the floor.
It wasn’t from the spigot on the wall behind the fridge. Water was covering the floor and a small wave was moving toward the cabinets and stove on the other side of the kitchen.
I opened the fridge and saw that the water jug was now tilted, its base no longer inside the indented platform, and water was pouring out of faucet above it.
Removing the jug immediately stopped the flow of water. As I did so, I saw that the square of folded tissue I had placed under the jug the day before had, like the jug itself, slipped out across the indented edge of the platform.
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Reflections
Over the next hour, my wife and I discovered that the tubs inside our fridge had inches of water in them and the kitchen floor required many towels to soak up what had escaped. I don’t know how many gallons made their way through that faucet, during the time it wasn’t receiving the message designed to shut it off. I’m just grateful that I discovered this disaster-in-the-making before permanent damage occurred.
When I wonder why the jug had only slipped out of its platform a day after I applied my unfortunate ‘solution’, I imagine that either I had swung the door especially forcefully that final time, or that the jug had been slipping forward across the folded piece of tissue, millimeter by millimeter, each time I closed the door—until the connection required for the faucet to turn off was finally broken.
I find myself imagining what would have occurred if, instead of going back to my room with a cup of coffee and returning 5 or 10 minutes later for a refill, we had left the house to have breakfast with friends and been gone for hours. In fact, it’s not inconceivable that some unlucky homeowner like us could have driven to the airport for a vacation, and returned to a house in which every square inch of floor, carpet, and engineered wood had to be torn up after soaking under water for weeks.
It feels like a moment of gratitude is being offered; a time to pause and acknowledge that such catastrophes, and far, far worse ones, are happening right now in America and around the world. My close call–even if our house had been flooded for weeks–falls so far short of what is occurring every day in the lives of countless people, that I know it’s time for me to understand just how truly fortunate I am.