The rain falling gently on a warm New Orleans night was the only sound I could hear as I stood on our back porch.

There were no sounds from street traffic nor from the rail traffic shuttling along the riverside docks. Just the patter of steady raindrops. The television and other electronic and digital whatnot inside failed to penetrate the shroud. Finally the warning of a foghorn far downriver eases through the rain.

I was basking in the success of a plumbing project. Over several decades of home ownership I have occasionally sworn off not calling a plumber the minute a problem arises. Those occasions have followed my own failed plumbing attempts that ended up with calling a plumber anyway.

But this plumbing crisis arose just as the weekend approached. I was in Batesville, the pipes weren’t flowing in New Orleans.

The same crisis has arisen several times before and plumbers were called. During their last visit, Rosemary overheard them say, “If it happens again, we’re going to have to …” do something that sounded expensive.

During the years we’ve been in this house, I’ve ended up spending considerable time under it. Just comes with being an old house. I’ve done a lot of thinking as I’ve pondered the various problems I’ve found. Meditation in crawl space can’t become too grave because you always know that whatever other distasteful tasks await, they can at least be faced standing up and out from under there.

Saturday’s repair required extensive crawling to reach a cleanout plug that the most recent pair of plumbers had not found, maybe even had not looked for. Various tools on hand at home for unclogging were applied down through the cleanout plug opening. Initial success eluded except that the clog was found in a bend in the pipe, just out of my sight as I peered down the cleanup plug opening with a flashlight. More tools for unclogging were purchased, increasing the desperation. The pinch of the plumber’s bill would compound if those new unclogging tools turned out to have been purchased needlessly.

Finally, one of the newly-purchased tools did the trick. A rubber bladder that attached to the hose. It fills with water, blocks the pipe on the upstream side and forces its high-pressure stream into the clog, dislodging it. Worked just like it was supposed to, which has happened rarely in life.