THE FLOOD THAT WASN'T MY FAULT

What's worse than being falsely accused? Not knowing the accusation is false hurts even more. One landlady, who I had the misfortune to rent from,accused me of plugging up the kitchen sink drain with food. At the time, I foolishly believed her.

When I returned from my parent's home one Sunday evening, the last thing I expected was a huge puddle covering my one-room suite. I immediately put down my suitcases in the front hall and knocked on the landlady's door. "There's a big puddle of water in my room," I reported when she opened the door. She brushed past me and peered into my suite. She gasped, then stood speechless as she gawked at the puddle of water.

"Why didn't you tell me your sink was plugged?" she accused.

"I didn't know it was," I explained. "I was home all weekend and the sink was working last Friday."

The landlady marched into her part of the house and returned with mops, buckets, and a plunger.

"Well, just don't stand there," she ordered, "help me clean up this mess."

As we mopped up the water, she bawled me out. "Why didn't you tell me your sink was draining slowly?" she demanded. "All this mess could have been avoided if you told me before. Now look at all this."

"I did tell you before but you didn't do anything about it," I reminded her.

"Oh," she said as if she didn't want to admit that I was right.

Once the water was mopped up, she started plunging the sink. "From soup to nuts, everything goes down the drain," my landlady complained.

"I tried not to let any food go down the drain," I apologized. She continued plunging the sink but the clog was too tight.

Until the plumber came a few days later, I had to use the bathroom sink on the second floor of the house. Once he had finished, the landlady paid me a visit. To cut a long story short, she accused me of costing her a lot of money. Naturally, I felt humiliated.

A month later, I described my problems to my Social Studies teacher. When I drew a diagram of the sink pipes linking the one upstairs and mine, He made an important point. "If the water came out of your sink, it must be plugged below it." I hadn't thought of that before. The knowledge that the flood wasn't my fault gladdened my heart.

Due to space and theme constraints, I casually mentioned this contentious woman in my How I Was Razed memoir. Nook and Kindle versions of it are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble while the paperback version can be purchased from the Virtual Bookworm website.