It never rains - it pours

It started with a smell, a curious mixture of damp and burning.

My first thought was the drains were playing up again; I flushed the toilet and ran some water in the bath to try and clear it.

Then I wondered if the burning smell was actually the derelict house next door – maybe someone had set fire to it. I opened the window and all looked OK, no worse than last time I looked with its smashed windows and debris scattered in the yard.

It was only later I realised what it was, I’ve smelt that smell before, damp hot water leaking from the hot water tank.

Hot water that eventually finds its way through the floorboards and trickles down the wall of the kitchen.

This has happened before and I’ve always suspected I should replace the tank with its dodgy fittings before I get the kitchen done otherwise I might inadvertently set in motion a catastrophe in my shiny new domain.

But I’ve neglected it, avoided the issue, and pretended it  would all go away – some things are just too much to deal with in my still relatively fragile state.

The issue is now a problem I can't escape, there's a bucket on the kitchen counter catching drips!

I am resigned to everything falling apart again, accepting of the fact the Aga has to be once more turned off, there is no hot water and no way to cook.

This is life with all its “crunchy” bits as one of my lecturers used to say.

Just as I avoided the plumbing dilemma I have been avoiding my unravelling-edges blog. Finding all kinds of other writing and non writing stuff to fill my time. But I’ve been poked and prodded of late into some kind of action.

“You need to do something with it to give you closure.” Someone said wisely yesterday.

And they are right, I will never completely move on from this state of being a widow but without finishing this project I started so long ago I will never move forward either.

I have so many dreams and thoughts and ideas for my future but I can’t side step all the hard bits, I can’t put this off much longer.

I am away from the household disaster zone at the moment; my son has a tennis course today so I am stuck indoors beside a tennis court, with some power for the laptop but no internet access. All I can feasibly “do” is write and sort out my hundreds of printed pages from my blog to try and work out how this all goes together.

Meanwhile at home my friend’s husband has my house key and he has sorted out a plumber to call while I am out.

Who knows what I will find on my return but as I left I noticed a rainbow sky, that deep dark cloudy blue perfectly lit by sunlight.

I searched and searched and as we drove along and suddenly I noticed it, dim at first, then brighter arching fully across the sky. My smile mirrored the rainbow’s curve, growing brighter and stronger.

Maybe the kitchen disaster is a blessing, the timing is uncanny, we were all set to start putting a new one in from next week. So it’s three steps back before we start marching forward but I will get there one day.

And as for turning unravelling into a book? You know on reflection some bits aren’t that bad, I might just be able to do it!