One Wednesday night, this past February, my cousin sent a Telegram message in our family’s shore house management thread saying that the thermostat app was showing the furnace as on a constant run, an atypical readout, for sure. She asked if someone would be able to go by the house to check on the thermostat and see if anything looked “funny”. Mike and I offered to swing by.

On the drive to the house that evening, I felt unusually calm. It was cold. Freezing, really, though warmer than earlier in the week when lows dropped to as little as three degrees (F) in our area, after multiple weeks of consistent, below freezing temps. On the way to the house, the car was rattling so we pulled into a parking lot and found there to be ice thoroughly frozen into one of the tire spokes. We chipped the ice out with our bare fingers, too clunky in our gloves, and a windshield scraper and continued on in pursuit of ascertaining the root of our greater uncertainty.

We parked at the curb in line with the front porch steps, the ground still coated in long-frozen snow, remnants from January’s relentless winter storms. Once we reached the porch, I felt suddenly light-headed. My insides contracted. It was the sound of rain that caused this reaction, the sound of rain when it was dry outside.

I unlocked the door with the leopard print key copy that Arlene made for me a long time ago and we stepped into the entry hall. My heart started to beat light and fast.

“Where is it coming from?!” I said, or maybe I didn’t. From the volume, it could have been coming from everywhere. Panic was bombarding every fiber of my consciousness.

The first floor of the house can be walked in a circle, always a great feature as a kid running around with my cousins, or lately, running around with my cousin’s son. I can’t remember now if I went left toward the kitchen or right toward the dining room. It doesn’t really matter, I guess. It was raining in both directions, after all.

“We should turn the water off,” I said.

We went down to the basement where we found it raining as well. The water rose above the bottom step; we estimated it was about a foot high where we could see it. And here I once thought of indoor home swimming pools as the epitome of luxury.

Looking at the water accumulation, I could feel my pulse in my ears. My heart raced. All logic turned off and my adrenaline kicked into overdrive. I fully acknowledge my stupidity in this next action. Don’t try this at home, kids.

The water was icy cold and crystal clear as I stepped into it, not to mention mercifully un-electrified. Thank you, Nana. In the glow of my phone flashlight, I waded the twenty-five or so feet to the main water-shutoff in the corner, the water rising higher on my leather boots with the sloped grade of the floor (for proper drainage toward the sump pump). I reached for the shutoff handle and willed it to turn. I worried it wouldn’t for a moment. Then, thank all the gods and angels and spaghetti monsters in the universes, it did. I made it back to the steps, my jeans and wool socks completely soaked through inside my knee-high, squelching boots.

Once back upstairs, we wandered the dark rooms with our phone flashlights, sweeping the lights from corner to corner, like amateur ghost hunters. We waited as the downpour reduced to a drizzle and then to a drip, drip, drip. Dark streaks bled from the dining room ceiling and moldings, down the walls, agonized mascara tears- wood stain and over a century’s worth of rafter-buildup freed from their confines by water. The ceiling, the floor, the furniture- everything reflected the light with a slick sheen.

The rooms appeared to have been victims of a violent attack.

“We should take pictures,” I said.

The storm had raged worst in the dining room, which makes sense. That’s where the plumber ended up finding two burst pipes in the ceiling a couple of days later.

We called a few 24-hour emergency water remediation companies and plumbers that had exaggerated their hours and left a few frantic voicemails feeling increasingly less hopeful that we’d get someone out that night. There was a water remediation company’s van parked down the street addressing a neighbor’s water damage. I ran over to the van and asked the two workers if they knew what we could do in the meantime. One of the men pointed at the phone number on the side of the van and read it out to me. I called and left a voicemail. I never heard back.

Mike said he’d update the family. My gut reaction was to hold in the trauma, keep it to ourselves until we knew exactly what we were dealing with. My gut reaction was illogical and protective. It was frightened and guilty and unsure. Thank goodness for Mike who is impervious to stress and stupidity.

“It’s not great guys…” read the start of his message.

You can say that again.

I tried to mop up the water on the kitchen floor with paper towels, but it just kept refilling which led me to find some of the lower cabinets filled with water as well.

Ever since Mike and I helped to take on managing the house from my aunt and uncle during the spring of 2020, and then recruiting the help of my cousins and sister the following summer, the house and I have had our share of run-ins. My attachment to the place quickly devolved from seeing it as the haven I once did in childhood and when I lived in New York to seeing it as an increasingly unpredictable opponent. I always told myself I was doing it for my family, doing what I could to keep the place going for everyone. Somewhere along the way, I forgot to enjoy the place for myself.

A few weeks before discovering the water damage, Mike had asked me what I most enjoyed about spending time at the house. I answered that my favorite recent memories were playing Five Crowns in huge groups at the dining room table and when people are cooking in the kitchen like Nana and Arlene used to. Finding these two rooms assaulted by water felt personal.

When the house pulls a harrowing stunt, I get a craving for whiskey. Whether it’s 3:00pm on a sunny Friday afternoon and I’m drenched with spray from a hose with a faulty water shutoff as the renters are pulling up, or I’m sweeping remnants of storm seepage from the corners of the basement with thirty minutes till the next renter arrives because the previous ones left an hour late, the sump pump broke during a storm, and the miraculous emergency plumbing repair just finished up. As I stood in the emo version of my family’s house, I could almost taste that sweet, sharp elixir on my tongue.

We texted some of the pictures to Maureen and her husband, Chris. Chris texted back, “Dining room all like ‘I’m ok. Trust me,” along with multiple gifs of mascara-teared characters. I laughed in the hysterical way that precedes crying.

We decided we’d come back in the daylight to assess the damage and take more photos. I had my gym stuff in the car and changed out of my jeans, socks, and boots. We left the house to its dripping, to its settling.

We drove to a pub in Asbury Park. Maureen Venmo’d me $20 for a drink. I ordered an Old Fashioned. I remembered Danielle and Corey’s Old Fashioneds, plentiful and shared in the dining room at the house, just a few summers before. Would that happen again?

The idea that the house could be brought back to a livable state in three months, the repairs- covered by insurance, didn’t seem in the realm of possibility that night. The uncertainty was a big stressor. As we worked with my uncle to set up the insurance claim and adjuster walkthrough, I felt less alone along the path to the place’s resurrection.

My uncle brought a crowbar and a tin of sardines the day of the claims adjuster walkthrough. My sister and my cousins came. I braced myself as my uncle was the first to arrive, after me. I had brought tissues in anticipation of everyone’s arrival, their first in-person look at the damage. My uncle walked in and looked at a big, white recliner that sits in the dining room-side corner of the living room, a source of ongoing family debate.

He said something like, “It’s too bad that chair survived, huh?”

I laughed. He hugged me for a long time and said, “Thank you.”

We ordered pizza on the porch and didn’t eat the sardines. I showed everyone my pictures of the china cabinet with the glasses inside filled with water. We followed the adjuster around from room to room, listening, asking questions, confusing him with our matching dark hair, black coats, black pants, and snow boots.

“I’m the one with the glasses,” I said, trying to help him differentiate.

We formed a “Calamity Consortium”.

We settled in for the “marathon, not a sprint” that the insurance adjuster kept assuring us the process would be. The plumber came and tore apart the dining room wall and ceiling and fixed the burst pipes.

I continued to snap photos with each change of each scene over multiple return visits.

The water remediation company took days to come and even more to get started. It turned out that pipes had been bursting all over New Jersey due to the cold. When the remediators came, they demolished and dried. They dissected the rooms right down to their bones.

As the kitchen demolition was in progress, Nic and I were at the house and the demo team called us into the kitchen to show us some notes they had found on the wall behind where the cabinets had been mounted. Notes from the Keltys and the Kavanaghs, family and friends, looked back at me. Notes from when something similar happened back in 1978 or 1979.

“Academy of St. Aloysius Class of 1983,” read one.

“There’s Nothing Better than a Vetter. Grand Ma says,” read another.

There were declarations of love to “Alan” and “Derek” in rough handwriting, pencil on plaster.

As I read the notes, I felt the past community of the house building around us as though confirming we might actually come out of this ok. Theresa and Billy and Robert and Corine had documented their having been through this before with their signature dose of good humor. Maybe Grand Ma was right.

Since the damage happened, I think of times when someone has knocked over a glass and someone says, “It’s ok; it was only water.”

I don’t know if I’ll ever view that phrase the same way again.

Julia and Nic went to work at bringing the house back to life. Over the weeks, the floors transformed. The walls. The moldings. The window frames. Fresh paint covered the seams and the scars. New furniture was bought and delivered and assembled. We put Nana’s little houses and tchotchkes back on the reconstructed plate rail. Boats and birds and light houses.

It looked like our home again, but better.

We carried the old chandelier to the alley and set it on the grass by the trash. It looked like a cursed relic exorcised from a haunted house.

Fast forward to last week, which I spent at the house. I played with my cousin’s son at the new dining room table, getting crushed at Paw Patrol Uno and creating comic book and non-comic book drawings. We created “Ralph, the couch ghost” out of one of the white chair’s throw pillows, a beach towel, and my sunglasses. We watched fireworks on the beach. I enjoyed sitting on the porch in the evening with my cousins and my aunt, sipping rose and dodging the big dumb beetles that have a tendency to fly right at the window screens, drawn to the cozy glow, within.

I had moments of laughing in the way where it’s hard to stop, a common occurrence in the company of my cousins. I woke up to the birds and watched TV with Eric in the living room. I got a kick out of him immersing himself in his Sonic iPad game on the porch. “OH YEAH!”

Over the week, my relationship with the place started to transform back to its former state with each nostalgic little moment. I felt conscious that the house was for me too and that I enjoy it, that I can do it for me and that, dare I say it, I want to, I think. This place is good, I thought. Sure, it may throw a couple punches now and then, but what old house doesn’t?

Nostalgia is a curious beast. It cuddled up around my feet while I was sipping Wedgewood mugs of tea on the couch and the porch. It glowed reassuringly from the hall, beneath the door of the room my cousins and I always slept in, growing up. It chirped in the tree down the street in the mornings and blew through the whistles on the lifeguard stands. It transported and comforted and fed me. It fueled my relaxation.

Finding the water damage this winter was among the most stressful moments in my life. Enjoying the house again once it was fixed back up felt just as significant though. I know in my head it’s not a person, but I don’t know, it’s comfort and coziness and its gathering us together in a positive way felt pretty personal to me.

After all, I mean, it was only water, right?