Il Pleure Dans Ma Maison

For those of you who are not Francophiles, the title of this blog is taken from Il Pleure Dans Mon Couer, a poem by Paul Verlaine.

Whenever it rains, I recall the first four lines of this poem, maybe because they are the only lines of that poem that I remembered since my high school's Advance Placement French classes.

This morning, being quite a rainy morning, caused me to recall those same words, but in a slightly different manner, as used in the title of this blog.

You see, not only was it raining outside the house, it was also raining INSIDE the house.

As I put the dogs outside this morning, and having gone into the kitchen on my way to get the dog food, I heard this very loud and persistent "drip-drip-drip-drip-drip...."

Uh-oh!

One side of the wooden platform, upon which Neil's weight lifting set stood in the workout room, was soaking wet. A deluge of several drops was raining down from the beams above.

Damn!

Grabbing basins and buckets, I ran into the workout room in effort to catch the drips from the ceiling.

If water was pouring from the workout ceiling, what was going on in the chill room above?

Going up there, I encountered an even far worse scenario. Water was pouring from the edge of the ceiling on the south side of the room. And there were many, many more areas where it was raining in the chill room.

Not only that, it was extremely difficult to reach those areas. Also, those areas presented a tight squeeze ~ a much tighter squeeze than that encountered in the workout room below.

SHIT!

I had to pull things away from the wall ~ a chair, a large mirror that was behind Ariana's very large bottle collection, and all sorts of chill room detritus.

Now I had to find vessels in order to catch all those drips.

I used a coffee pot, cigarette ash stained coffee cups, Tupperware bowls, baking dishes, a flower vase, a metal can, you name it.

With all the different vessels used to catch the drips, the indoor rain drops and drips created an interesting musical symphony.

The top of Neil's metal filing cabinet contained a lake. And everything in that lake was ruined.

I needed to place the baking pans ~ which had very shallow sides ~ up on the filing cabinet because there was not much space between the top of the cabinet and the edge of the sloping ceiling, from where all those drips were coming from.

There was even one drip that was going behind the filing cabinet. But, alas, there was nothing that was able to get into such a narrow spot in order to catch the drips. As such, I took Ariana's velour hoodie and stuffed it on top and behind the filing cabinet.

Speaking of wet clothes, some of Ryan's clothes, which he had stored up there, were saturated.

All while I was rushing to place water collectors underneath the drips, I was being mindful of the time. Pretty soon I had to wake up Ariana for school.

I didn't even have the chance to get dressed when I woke her up.

Ariana stepped out of her room and into the chill room. She stopped dead in her tracks.

"Shit!"

My sentiments exactly.