"On The Edge"

         The working poor live on the edge of poverty, where every little thing can impact their lives tremendously. Emergencies that many people absorb by dipping into a savings account, or using a credit card, hit hard because there is no reserve stash of cash. If your extended family survives on a month-by-month budget, turning to them for help adds to a layer of embarrassment and failure to the problem.

         On Thanksgiving, when we arrived at my brother’s home, a pool of water on the front porch greeted us. We immediately suspected a water leak and sniffed out the problem before we even put our bags into the spare bedroom. The water line going to his refrigerator hissed. Cutting open the wall, we found a nasty spray of water. The plumber my brother uses was out of town for the holiday and wouldn’t be able to check out the problem until the following Tuesday. We headed to Walmart (the only place open) and bought a variety of patch options, which we Frankensteined over the whole as a temporary fix. The hissing leak slowed to a sighing trickle.

         As the plumber did his repair, my brother called with the news. First, he was extremely lucky. The water hadn’t backed into his kitchen. His kitchen cabinets and the sheetrock along that wall remained dry. All of the water had flowed forward and had seeped out to the front of the house along the exterior foundation. We worriedly asked about the plumber’s fee. If he only did the repair and didn’t patch the sheetrock, the bill would run about $400.00—a huge chunk of money out of the fund our family maintains for my brother’s home and car emergencies. We decided that we could run down to my brother’s house in a few weeks to fix the wall. The hole hid behind the refrigerator, so it wasn’t an eyesore.

         As usual, events in our own lives kept shifting back the trip to repair the wall. Then horrendous rain storms pushed back the date even further. The hideous gap remained for over four months. Although it didn’t take long to cut a patch, float and tape and texture the area (plus add a new coat of paint to the wall), that repair would’ve added a huge dollar amount to the plumber’s bill if he’d used his supplies and time fixing the wall.

         My brother’s gratitude for our help always reminds us of how difficult it is for someone working full-time, but not at a livable wage, to absorb setbacks. When he stated optimistically, “If you have to have something go wrong, just hope it goes wrong in the right way,” I had to smile.

Copyright 2018 Elizabeth Abrams Chapman