Every time I think of this story, I shudder. My husband and I had just wanted to get away for a quiet weekend, you know? Time away from phones, TV’s, and computers. So we decided to take the kids and go camping for a few days. The two girls would stay with my husband Pete and me in our travel trailer, and we’d pitch a tent for the two boys.
We chose a nice, quiet campsite on a small lake. The water was perfect, with barely a ripple on its surface. We inflated our dinghy and launched our canoe. It was fall and too cold to swim so we were all careful not to rock the boats too much. Early the first morning, while the kids were still sawing logs in their sleeping bags, Pete and I stole away into the morning mist that swirled around the lake’s surface. Pete fished while I paddled so he could troll. Loons, swimming so close that we could touch them, sent their eerie calls into the otherwise still morning air. We could see their black beaks open, see their throats wobble as they cried. It was the most calming experience ever. Surely this calm, relaxed feeling would stay with us as we returned home to our busy lives…wouldn’t it?
We played games, barbecued and sat around an evening fire. It was the perfect get-away. Looking back on it, maybe God was saying, ‘You deserve this relaxing respite to de-stress, to prepare you to handle anything that might come your way.’
We have a beautiful log home. The basement had been unfinished and up until this wonderful weekend get-away, every weekend in the past six months had been spent finishing it. It was done – the boys had bedrooms finally, the TV had a place in the family room, there was even a games room complete with pool table/ping pong table. It was the basement of our dreams.
Until we came home – then it was the wet basement of our nightmares! The water tank had burst. Their was no drain in the furnace room where it sat and that room was just off the games room, behind a door. But that door didn’t hold the water back – the whole new basement was now a wet basement. And it stank!
It must have happened shortly after we left on our camping trip. Ever smell a carpeted wet basement? That new paint and carpet smell had been replaced by a mildewy-dank smell in three short days.
I called a ‘carpet doctor’ in a panic and told him about our wet-basement problem and asked him what we should do. He offered to come right over and assess the situation.
He didn’t have to tell me, I just knew. Replace the carpets or face a dank-wet-basement-smell forever. Good thing we’d had that respite. Even though we felt pretty ‘blue’, I believe it was God’s way of helping us cope with a very stressful situation.
