The Walking Dead Garage, or the Dangers of Moving In

Picture this: new husband and wife with two young children need to buy a house in nineteen days or pay capital gains tax. No pressure, right? Well, we did it. We found a tiny cottage, closed escrow in record time, shoved most of our belongings in the garage, and began life in the school district of our dreams. Well, my dreams. My daughter decided she was so excited about having a bedroom of her very own that she asked if she could have her best friends over for a Friday night slumber party the week after we moved in. Sure, why not? They could play all night long, their mothers could pick them up by noon on Saturday, and we could be at the baseball field in time for opening ceremonies of my five-year old’s Little League team. No worries. I should have worried but I was too tired from moving, working, cooking, chasing, you know the routine. I’d always wanted to lead the Brady Bunch life and I thought this was my golden opportunity. Here is what actually happened: Three or four girls were dropped off by their parents on Friday night. I think we fed them pizza. Don’t quote me. I just know we mostly left them to their own devices because the male parent of the household hid in our bedroom the whole evening and escaped to work early Saturday morning and the female parent was way too naive. Somewhere between pizza and playing in the backyard, my daughter thought it would be fun if they all dyed their hair. What did they use and where did they get it? Couldn’t tell you. All I know is when they finally woke up Saturday morning and straggled out to find something to eat, most of them had green hair. Thinking I would have time to make sure they were showered, shampooed and de-greened before their mothers picked them up, I proceeded with the urgent business of the day, which was to put my son’s filthy Little League uniform in the washing machine so it would be clean by 3 pm, when we all needed to be on the field. As I was doing this, I heard a loud popping sound. No screams followed, so I decided to investigate after retrieving something from the garage, something to do with the kids’ needs. Or mine. Needed thing; went to find thing. Opening the garage door was much harder than the day before. This heavy wooden portal from 1949 had thick coils inside that were supposed to help you lift the beast. They certainly weren’t helping now. When I finally managed to lift the thing, I looked around to see what was the matter. That’s when I noticed one of the coils was missing and there was a hole in the garage roof. Apparently, Saturday morning was the time in space when the coil had snapped its moorings and blasted off on its way to Mars. I was told later we were lucky no one was nearby when this happened because they could have been impaled during liftoff. Never mind. Fix it later. Whatever I needed now was on top of a pile of boxes. I managed to climb up the stack and almost reached the right carton when my daughter and her friends burst out the back door screaming, “The washing machine is flooding! The washing machine is flooding!” In my haste to rush to the rescue, I lost my footing, tumbled off the mountain of cartons, and sliced my shin open on a lawnmower blade. The mower in question had appeared out of nowhere; I think we inherited it with the house. I was lucky I didn’t get tetanus. What I did get was blood running into my slipper, but I didn’t have time to waste with bandaids. The girls were not exaggerating. Sudsy water was cascading out of the washing machine, flooding the kitchen, and soaking into the dining room carpet. Slamming the Off button, I grabbed a mop and start frantically swabbing and sopping before the water made its way into the living room. There was no time to worry about bloody shins. Using every towel we owned, I soaked up most of the carpet except for a far corner. Lifting the carpet and pad, I beheld a small pond. This is when I discovered our cottage had slipped off of a foundation support, causing the dining room floor to sag, which probably accounted for the cracks in the wall above that area. Of course it did. However, before I could do more than bail water, the doorbell rang. One of the mothers arrived earlier than expected. She seemed a little distracted by my disheveled appearance and maybe the smell of reeking wet carpet. Matters didn’t improve when her pajama-clad daughter peeked around the door. Mind you, I’d never seen this child until the previous night nor her mother until that moment. When she beheld the matted green hair, she angrily asked, “When did this happen? Why did you let them do this?” “I’m not sure. Some time after everyone else was asleep? It washes out. I think.” She gave me a disgusted look and disappeared with her child, never to return. No, really, literally, her daughter was never allowed to come to our house or play with my daughter. Some people have no sense of humor. One by one the other girls left. The dining room carpets were left pulled back to air dry while I made desperate phone calls. It was still early in the day and I needed to wash and dry a baseball uniform before 2:45. (Why didn’t I wash it by hand, you ask? I lacked the scrubbing board and the scrubbing strength to remove the stains that only a hyperactive five-year old can embed into polyester. I needed an ancient washing machine to do the dirty work for me.) We were in luck! The first plumber’s office I called promised someone would be there within the hour. Hours passed. Shins were bandaged. Hair was restored to ash brown. The five-year old continued to run through the house like a banshee. Plumbers were nowhere to be seen, but I had faith. Faith. Right. All I can say is when I walked back into the kitchen after returning to the garage to grab the thing I needed in the first place, I saw that my son had helped himself to a container of strawberry yogurt and decided it would be fun to smear a strip of it along all four walls of the kitchen. When he ran out of walls, he smeared the cupboards. Some people refer to me as Tear Ducts of Steel. It takes nuclear war or an old man waving an American flag to reduce me to weeping, but I seriously considered it. However, before I could deal with pink walls and wet eyes, I still had to find out where was the plumber. When I reached him on the phone, I asked him how long it would be before he arrived. “Arrive where?” “At my house, didn’t you get my message? “Oh, yeah. I got the message but I thought it was a prank call.” Are you hyperventilating now? I’m not making any of this up; if anything, I’m leaving significant parts out due to brain damage. “Listen,” I hissed between my teeth. “I have a five-year old who has to be on a baseball field in a clean white uniform by three o’clock today. He cannot show up in a dirty uniform. The reputation of our entire family depends upon you getting over here right now, this very minute, and fixing whatever is broken! Do I make myself clear?” Maybe he had Little Leaguers of his own. Either way, he came. he fixed. Want to know what he fixed? During a house remodeling, someone took a shortcut and stuck an uncapped pipe into the wall for the washing machine hose that empties the water. To this day there’s a metal gizmo sticking out at an angle in my kitchen, waiting for me to put a garden hose down its throat. Apparently the people living in the house before me never used the washing machine, but they did fry food. You could tell because if you touched the wall, your hand stuck to it, unless of course you were smearing yogurt. The plumber did his duty, the black widow spiders floated away to build nests elsewhere, the uniform turned white again, the walls got washed, and everyone was free to stay out of my way. Yes, we made it to the baseball field on time. No, I don’t have a scar on my shin. Yes, I am still living in the same house, only now I have an automatic garage door opener. No one died that day, except maybe some poor unsuspecting creature felled by a flying shock absorber. I strangled neither my yogurt-filled son, my green-haired daughter, the plumber who thought it was a prank call, nor the husband who wisely avoided all the fun. I would have, I wanted to, but in the end I was way too tired. Welcome to the Brady Bunch life, folks. Welcome to the neighborhood.