In Our Own Backyard...Which comes first - the faucet or the feline?

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Talk about it

It all started with a drip.

Every once in a while, our kitchen faucet would leak a teeny bit when both of the faucets were turned off. It didn’t amount to much, but it was a sign that something was probably wearing out or in need of repair. That was back before the holiday season, and with all that was going on during that busy time of the year, it was easy to put that innocent little drip on hold until “things quiet down a little.”

Every once in a while my husband or I would tweak the faucets a little, or monkey around with the connections under the sink, and for a while the drip would go away. It always came back.

We would be watching television in the evening, and all of a sudden I would be aware of the cautious “drip….drip….drip” of the kitchen faucet, particularly if there was a pot or pan soaking in dish water in the sink. After a while, that was pretty much all I could hear, and I’d have to jump up and drain the water or turn the faucet to the other side of the sink where the drip wasn’t quite so loud.

One time, I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t fall back to sleep for some reason or other. I laid there and thought of all of the things I had to do in the day ahead. I mentally planned out my grocery list. I debated whether I should update the settings on my Facebook account. And I wondered if I’d put my black dress pants in the last load of wash. By the time I had gone through enough mental calisthenics to send even the lightest of sleepers back to dreamland, I finally felt myself begin to doze off.

And then, I heard it. That intermittent drip….drip….drip – all the way down the hallway from the kitchen!

The next day, we called the plumber. There are some things that are just inevitable, and fixing that drip was one of them.

I arranged to be home on the day of the appointment, and when he arrived by late morning, I was more than eager to have the awful thing fixed. I explained the problem to him and he got out his tools and went to work.

I was making small talk with him as he worked, and I told him that someone in our house wasn’t going to be all that happy to have that leak fixed – Sunshine, our year-old female cat. It seems she has a fascination with any sort of running or dripping water and routinely hounds Ken and me each morning as we are brushing our teeth at the bathroom sink. At first, we got such a kick out of her antics that every once in a while we’d turn on the faucet just to watch her bat the water with her paw.

You can only imagine how thrilled she was when the kitchen sink started to drip. It was as though we’d arranged it just for her private enjoyment, and when we weren’t looking she’d leap to the edge of the sink and crouch in wait for the next drip to come out. We could always tell she’d been up there because the fur on her head and feet would be saturated in water.

The plumber nodded to me knowingly and said, “Yup, yours is a pretty common problem.”

“The leaky faucet?” I asked.

“Nope, a cat who likes the dripping water!” he responded with a grin.

In what seemed like no time, the plumber had managed to work whatever kind of magic had eluded Ken and me in trying to fix the darn thing, and the faucet was no longer leaking.

“Is there anything else you need me to do today?” he asked as he started to wrap things up.

“You know,” I replied, “I discovered just the other day that the faucet in the upstairs bathroom has kind of a wiggly handle. Maybe I should have you take a look at it as long as you’re here…”

He was only gone a couple of minutes when he came back and told me, “Well, I tightened up that handle a little for you. Oh, and by the way, your cat is going to be very happy…”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Because that one’s leaking, too!”

Tags: in our own backyard, opinion