What To Do?

            Something didn’t sound right.

            Turning away from the sink, I saw that the toilet had flushed but now was filling with water.  I lifted the lid, took a closer look, and panicked.  Hastily setting the tank lid on the floor, I watched the inexorable rise of water, almost to the rim now. 

            I took a guess and pulled up the chain.  Wrong move.  The water became a fountain, spilling over the brim, cascading onto the tiled floor, following gravity down the two inch lip between half bath and bedroom floor.  I immediately dropped the chain, but the water kept coming.  What to do?  What to do? 

            A long-unused bit of information found its way to my shrieking brain, and I reached behind the chain to pull up the float.  The fountain ceased, but the spilled water kept its quick course into my bedroom on those beautiful hardwood floors.  I let go of the float; the flood renewed.  I grabbed the float and tried to think.  Clearly I needed help.  Hoping to wake my son at the other end of the house, I hollered as loud as my post-bronchitis voice would allow but to no avail.

            There I stood in a good half inch of water, watching it fan out into the bedroom.  What to do?

            And then I remembered the water turn-off valve, you know, the one at the back of the toilet.  I thought back to my garden-watering days on Whidbey Island and my brother’s words:  “Righty, tighty; lefty, loosey.”  Maintaining my death grip on the float with my right hand, I bent down to turn the valve to the right with my left hand.  I turned and turned and turned and finally it was off.  Gingerly, I let go the float and nothing happened.

            I had already slid the throw rug to the bathroom threshold and tossed my bathrobe on the bedroom floor. Now I raced to the hall closet for towels to mop up the mess.  As I cleaned up the lake under my bed, I noted that it had been a long time since a dust mop had visited those nether regions.  Once the hardwood was dry, I made quick work of the bathroom floor.  And then I called the plumber.

            Five hours and $120 dollars later, I started a load of sopping wet towels in the washer and counted my blessings, the chief of which was that the toilet had flushed completely before it became a fountain.