There’s a storm drain in front of my house on Maple Hollow Lane.
It’s nothing special. Just a rectangle of iron bars set into the curb, about two feet wide, where the street dips down at the bottom of the hill. Every house on our street drains toward it. Every gutter, every downspout, every driveway. When it rains, all the water from eleven houses comes rushing down the hill and pours through those iron bars into the pipe underneath.
And every fall, when the leaves come down from the big oaks and maples that line our street, that drain clogs.
My husband, Danny, was the one who figured that out.
It was our first October in the house. Eight years ago. A big storm came through on a Saturday night. Danny and I woke up at two in the morning to the sound of rushing water. We went to the front window. The whole bottom of the street was a lake. Water up over the curb. Up into our front yard. Creeping up our driveway toward the garage.
Danny pulled on his boots and his raincoat and went out into it. I watched him from the window, wading out into the street with a rake and a flashlight in the pouring rain. He knelt down in the water. He pulled out armfuls of soggy leaves from the drain. Handful after handful. He threw them up onto our lawn.
After about ten minutes, I heard it. A deep, sucking gurgle. The water started to swirl. And then it went down, all at once, like somebody had pulled the plug in a bathtub.
He came back inside soaked to the skin, grinning.
“Somebody’s got to do it,” he said, dripping on the kitchen floor. “Might as well be us. We’re at the bottom of the hill.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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