There’s nothing like a broken sump pump in the bowels of the muddy crawlspace beneath your house during a torrential downpour at 10:30 p.m. on a Saturday to take your mind off a global pandemic.

Between finishing a late dinner and selecting a season five episode of Downton Abbey (the one where Lady Rose gets married), the red and orange storm we were tracking on our weather apps came down the driveway and parked its rainy self over our acreage for as long as it took to unload at least two inches of turbulent gushing water onto everything beneath the skies. At first, the lightning was a brilliant flash-purple color and I persuaded Patrick to join me in turning off all the lights (yes honey, phones too…) to watch it backlight the just-in-bud sycamores on the western edge of the creek. Our living room windows framed it spectacularly and we ooohed and ahhhed like kids at a fireworks show. But when the rains came, and kept coming, we transformed our awe into responsible homeowner concern, keeping an ear to the hum of the sump pump below the floorboards.

Silence.

Just before the part in Lady Rose’s reception where she confronts her mother about trying to stop the wedding (sorry…should have written “spoiler alert!”), I suggested to Patrick that maybe we ought to check the basement. He pulled one of the rechargeable emergency lights from the outlet by the mudroom door, creaked open the old crawlspace door, and came back into the living room grim-faced. “Uh-oh, Spaghettios”, he said softly, exhibiting an unnatural calm given the circumstances (ten years ago, I’d have heard a string of expletives coming from below the house that would have continued as he emerged from the basement and made his way back through the mudroom, the kitchen and the living room on his way to the bathroom to get the Tylenol. I loved him then and love him still, grateful for the growth that’s brought him to where he is now). There were several inches of water making a slurry of mud and other floating bits of crawlspace debris, creeping dangerously higher toward the furnace that lives and functions atop a small concrete slab, an island of warm protection against our cold winter nights. It is important to add that this is a new furnace, installed by two stalwart and brave service technicians in February who insisted that they’d seen worse locations for such a machine than our humble dirt hole under the joists.

To the right of the unit was our back-up trash pump; Patrick quickly set it down in the swirling brown water and snaked the attached green garden hose up to where I stood at the top of the stairs (not really “stairs” but a couple of precarious concrete ledges that gave you some sort of footing before you dropped into the dank and slippery abyss) so I could drag it out the back door and shove the soon-to-be flowing end of the hose into the catch basin that drained down the hill. It worked like it was supposed to, buoying our spirits for the next step in the repair operation.

In any project like this—part engineering and part emergency response—even the most solid of relationships can be tested. We’ve had our share of nature-meets-house catastrophes over the years, and we’re not still together simply because it’s convenient. We’ve used those experiences to carve new depths into our respect for one another, and expand our reservoirs of forgiveness beyond what we thought they could offer. We’re both strong managers with excellent ideas. And if you’ve ever worked in such a dynamic, you know that there’s often more than one right way to get a job done. When the stakes and tensions are high, though, the luxury of time to discuss and arrive at consensus isn’t anywhere in your toolkit, and you learn quickly, sometimes painfully, to defer to the one holding the hammer (or, in last night’s case, the short-handled shovel used to dig out the sump pump that was stuck in the mud that had collected just above the gravel bed of the sump pit). I stood at the top of the basement concrete ledges, sending words of encouragement down to the shadowed outline of his hunched-over 5’ 9” frame (unless you’re a small child, you can’t stand upright in this space. So far, no child has accepted our invitation to give it a go), and tried not to ask bothersome questions. In my chicken boots, I trudged through the sludge outside the back door to fetch buckets and bricks, reposition the drainpipe poking out from the foundation, and toss dry microfiber towels down to him to wipe off his hands and the electrical cords that we hoped against all hope would deliver the juice needed to keep draining that water away from the base of the furnace. In a crisis, we all have something of value to contribute.

Turns out the pump unit needed a thorough flush in a bucket of clear water to get it working again. A quick reconnection of the drainpipe sections and a plug-in later, we pulled off our muddy wet clothes, hung them on the line outside for an au naturel rinse by Mother Nature herself, put on pajamas and sank into our places on the couch. Below the floorboards, the reliable hum told us we’d done the job right, and we exhaled as one.

For about three hours, we didn’t trade words or worries about the swift and frightening spread of the novel coronavirus, projected estimates of new infections in Ohio or elsewhere across the country, or comment on the heartbreaking stories from that hospital in Brooklyn featured in a New York Times article we’d both read the day before. Instead, we marveled at how quickly we’d moved from a couch-view purple light show to a furnace rescue operation, and didn’t hurl a single frustrated or sharp word in the other’s direction. Not a miracle, but certainly an outcome worth noticing.

Dear ones, our lives are still going on underneath and around and in between the news reports of this horrible viral outbreak. They must if we are to land on the other side of its insidious and relentless pace with a solid grasp of what really matters and how we infuse that into our next iteration of “normal”. I do hope you are taking breaks from whatever your news sources are to hear that wind howling through those just-in-bud branches of the Bradford pear tree by your front deck. Or to notice that the grass has suddenly become new and green again—wasn’t it brown just the other day? Look at your hands resting in your lap and consider all that they have seen and done to be helpful to someone else—family member, stranger or friend. And now they’re going to tear lettuce leaves into smaller pieces and shred carrots and create a meal that will keep you alive for another day. It’s just as important as holding frontline healthcare staff in your hearts, fiercely praying for their safety. I recommend doing both.

Here at Naked Acres, the dirt floor of our crawlspace is a little bit dryer and less slimy. That’s enough for now.

Oh, and the finches have returned. Time to fill the thistle socks hanging from the young mulberry trees off the front deck.