When I moved into my house nearly ten years ago one of the first things I noticed was that the water pressure was essentially the strength of a Windex spray bottle from the 80s. To say I "took a shower this morning" would have been a lie. More accurate would be: "water leaked on me from a faucet sticking out of a wall."
I don't know why, but I just sort of accepted this as fine and normal. "Oh, it's an old house!" I'd tell people when they came over and noticed the problem. "You know how old houses are!"
My home is one hundred years old and it sits in an old neighborhood. I assumed every house on the street had the same problem. That for some reason, if the houses are old, they can't include respectable water pressure.
Then, about a year ago, I mentioned this to my brother-in-law, Jeff.
Jeff is one of those people who somehow knows how to do everything. He's been the family MVP 16 out of the last 20 years. The four years he lost were because he didn't submit his name for consideration in order to give someone else a chance.
One time I had a sprinkler pipe burst and he showed up and fixed it within like twenty minutes and when he was done I somehow had free cable and a complimentary subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud. I've seen this man remodel a kitchen using a butterknife. I'm confident the laws of physics don't even apply to him.
So when I told Jeff about how "my house is old so we can't have any water pressure rofl lol isn't that silly" he was like, "uh. That's not a thing."
Jeff told me that actually old houses can have normal water pressure. And electricity that doesn't flicker when you turn on more than one light at once.
He suggested that I may just need a new thermodynamic elasticity vibrational regulationary systematic himboflation.
Or something. I don't remember what it was called. The moment he started saying words I didn't know my brain tuned everything out and started playing an old episode of Full House. The one where Michelle falls off the horse and gets amnesia for a day and doesn't remember who she is until her memory comes to her in the form of a ghost and explains she ran away because she got scared. It was a really cool scene for the Real Fans because Mary Kate and Ashley had been playing Michelle together so this was the first time we were able to see them both on screen having a conversation with each other. Unfortunately the twins were too busy/not interested/billionaires to return for Fuller House so they never show up in the five-season reboot. I've always felt really conflicted about that because, like, on the one hand, I get it. But on the other hand, would it really have been all that difficult for them to make one cameo for the show that gave them their careers, especially considering everything John Stamos has done for America? Fortunately Fuller House was a stunning success despite their absence.
By the time I finished explaining Full House to Jeff, he was already in his car driving away from me.
I sat on this information Jeff had given me about how maybe the water pressure thing could be fixed for a full year. Then I saw him this week on Monday.
We had a family dinner at a restaurant near my house. I love family dinners because they mean I have a captive audience, no matter how reluctant, and an opportunity to perform. This week's offering included a full recounting of the timeline of the Kate Middleton Crisis, what we know about the Glasgow Wonka Experience, and a thorough exploration of each and every theory about whether these events might be connected.
By the time my family had sufficiently shouted me down to get me to stop talking, we were all on our way out the door.
Skylar had invited my sisters to come over right after dinner so he could perform dermatological experiments on them, something I'm consistently baffled so many people in our lives are willing to do.
So, they, Jeff in tow, showed up at our house, and that's when Jeff offered to take a look at that water pressure thingy he had previously mentioned.
Minutes later, I watched as he crawled through a crawl space Skylar and I had previously closed off with caution tape and which we treat like a crime scene because we think there might be spiders or snakes or a chupacabra in there.
Jeff instantly found what he was looking for and he summoned a wrench from his wrist like he was Wolverine so he could, in one simple motion, twist one thing one time.
"Try turning on the faucet now," he said to us.
I did.
Friends.
It turns out old houses can have normal water pressure.
Skylar and I have been turning on the shower several times a day just to watch, like we're a Nineteenth Century prairie family that just got indoor plumbing for the first time.
We have lived for ten years with something annoying (and ubiquitous in our lives) that could be fixed for free in twenty seconds.
If only my own Michelle horse ghost could have appeared and explained this to me a decade ago.
~It Just Gets Stranger