Cooling heels in the well house

I have a friend who was widowed a year and a half ago. She has always been a pretty capable person. She can sing and dance, act, and play a musical instrument and do several other things that are above and beyond the call of duty. Additionally, she can cook and clean, and pay the bills on time. She is literally a soccer mom and she manages a household of mostly girls.

So since she has started checking a different marital status box on her medical and banking records, she has had to learn to do a little bit different set of chores around the house. Things like hang the Christmas lights, and run the snow blower.

To say the least I am proud of her self-sufficiency. She uses the snow blower to clean the driveway, and the tractor to hang the lights, and not the other way around. In fact she uses that tractor for all kinds of chores. Hey, she could teach tractor classes.

So the other day she went out to change the filter on the pump in her well house. I am impressed. Some of you out there don’t know whether you have a well house, let alone where it is. Well, she does and she has learned to change the filter.
But when her late husband built the well house, he didn’t have his wife’s capabilities in mind.

First, it is a huge stretch of the imagination to call this structure a well house—about the same stretch we use in calling the old outdoor toilet an outhouse. There isn’t much “house” about this well house. I don’t think it even has four walls. It is circular in shape, and I know it doesn’t have a roof.

I haven’t actually seen this well house. Unlike the visible portion of the outhouse, it is about six feet underground. And it can’t be seen from the road, the sidewalk, or the driveway
Well, in order to keep anyone from accidentally falling into the well house, my friend’s husband made a heavy round lid for the top of it. He made it so heavy that no mischievous child would be able up and edge and put a firecracker under it either. (I am picturing an extra heavy-duty manhole cover here.) Needless to say, it is too heavy for my friend, as well as eighty percent of the rest of the world’s population to lift.

And so a neighborhood handyman modified the lid so that with her tractor and a chain, my friend can lift the lid with the tractor’s bucket and then do whatever it is people do in well houses, in this case, change the filter.

So on the day in question, she got one end of the chain on the tractor and the other end on the lid which she raised with the bucket. Then she climbed the ladder down into the well house. She had barely put one foot on the well house floor when she heard the rattle of the chain slipping followed by the clang of the lid falling right into its appointed place.

That was when my friend departed from her normal self-sufficient character and did what women usually do when there is danger near. First she began to scream. Second she began to hyperventilate and scream which caused her heart rate to be a consideration.

Next she thought “My gosh, what am I doing? I have to quit screaming and hyperventilating, I am using up all of the oxygen. I am going to die down here if I don’t scream, but I am going to die sooner if I do.”
I am glad to say that her self-sufficient nature began to reassert itself in a short time and she was beginning to have a rational thought or two by the time help arrived, which was quickly.

But in the event that you think you might react the same way in this situation, assuming that you have an underground well house and you need to change your filter, just understand that her initial primitive reaction was very helpful.

Her screams woke one daughter and the clang of the “trap door” alerted the other. The one with skills of her own flew out the door, and after upending in a snow bank in her hurry, reattached the chain and raised the bucket in time to narrowly avert the occurrence of death by whatever means imaginable.