Things undone

I hope it is true that we all have things we leave undone by defaulting to not thinking about them. Dumb, often piddly, things that we “should” attend to but have somehow filed in that little brain-closet with the door that we see so many times it looks like part of the woodwork. By the way, if you don’t have this trait, you probably shouldn’t tell me about it.

Every so often that brain-closet door doesn’t quite hold, or something worms its way around the hinges. And you look at it, because--there it is. And maybe do something. And maybe wonder why you’d avoided it for so long.

Allen was in my basement yesterday, partially because some people are just the type who would be interested in what you find in basements, and he definitely falls into that category. Case in point: We paid special attention to the manifold. The Manifold (and mine is so manifestly a manifold that it does almost deserve capitalization,) is the intricate network of pipes, pumps, and valves that sends hotness from the water heater to the tubes that underlie the flooring upstairs, thus enabling radiant heat. Allen liked my Manifold a lot, and maybe it should be a source of reassurance to me that someone can examine the thing and quickly comprehend its intricacies, but at the same time there’s a part of me that’s irked by being bested in the Manifold-comprehension department. Anyway, once we’d ogled Yank the Plumber’s handiwork sufficiently, he noticed the lonely little Bryant HVAC unit sitting, unused, next to my utility sink. So I had to explain that I don’t run it, because the thermostat to it is located, awkwardly and inaccessibly, behind the enormously heavy antique dish cupboard in the kitchen. As if that’s a good enough reason not to operate one’s climate control systems more efficiently.

Yeah, so I’ve had a day or so to think about that one. I even gave the cupboard a token shove this morning with the idea that I should be able to detach the thermostat from the wall, tug out the wiring a bit, and at least place it on top of the cupboard where it could be operated.

What happened when I shoved the cupboard was nothing. On the basis of mass, it is much more gravitationally attracted to the Earth than I am.

Chances are, you’ve already thought ahead on this one: Emily, you may be thinking, why don’t you take the dishes and junk out of the cupboard and THEN try to move it? And the only answer I can supply is--because the whole idea of doing that was locked firmly in the overlooked brain-closet, until events conspired to pry it out. At the moment, I’m not going to look around for more things that I should have gotten to years ago, but haven’t. And if this particular task stays out in the open, the empty space will not remain, because ignore-it closets, like nature, abhor vacuums. I’ll just ignore something else.