Put that in your pipe

We shut our house trap last week.

It had succumbed to age, requiring a plumber’s help to unclog twice in four days. It had to go.

Turns out the toilet draining itself dry without warning wasn’t a parlor trick after all. Nor did we need the original house trap any longer since all our sinks have their own traps now.

It was a dinosaur, its once-shiny, U-shaped glory marred by 69 years of corrosion.

Thankfully we were able to get someone in quickly to remedy the problem. (The promise of payment will do that.)

ejbSF/Flickr

The fix was neither quick nor quiet.

Two nice men spent the day here — one in our crawl space sawing and banging and clanging, the other digging a three-foot trench in the flower bed next to our front door.

It made for a teeth-rattling day of work, even huddled as I was up in Catherine’s bedroom behind a closed door.

Late in the day, after the trap has been excised and new straight piping installed in its place, a third man arrived with a high-pressure hose to test the setup and our pipes out to the street. We passed. No blockages to be found.

As people will do, the men gabbed a bit — Basil among them by now, lest he miss even a second of what they were up do.

I couldn’t help but listen as snippets of conversation filtered up through the open window.

What do men talk about, you wonder?

It was a regular hen party minus the laundry list of physical ailments most women compare notes about.

Various topics of discussion:

• Beer and how nice a cold one would be.
• The challenging job they did recently in a tight space to find the diamond ring some woman accidentally lost down the drain.
• What is was like to serve in the Navy.
• Visiting Greece.
• How unwelcoming Russians were when one fella visited there.
• Coffee — to drink or not to drink? Iced or hot? Insomnia-inducing or not?

It was all I could do not to call down and ask if they wanted coffee cake.

However, I managed to keep my trap shut, and before long, the plumbing trucks were gone.

Quiet returned and we again felt flush, but not in the classic sense.