Renovation

For as long as I can remember, my father was a water man. When I was born he was making a living in the irrigation business, installing sprinkler systems to help keep the manicured lawns of greater Orlando lush and bright. At our house, we didn’t pour a lot of money into the landscape. My mother attended to porch ferns with a watering can and relied on the rain to soak the yard, which contained very little except for a grapefruit tree my father had high hopes would someday yield a crop. He sprinkled tablespoons of nitrogen around the trunk and joked that the tree deserved “a better life,” which in his line of work meant lateral pipes, timers, and moisture sensors. It’s probably only natural that, over time, I grew to associate dripping shrubs with lots of money, despite the fact that we lived in Florida and rain was almost constant. Water, I learned, was the most abundant element in nature whose only value came from controlled and measured distribution. Our lives invariably revolved around its input and output, and the same rules which governed the natural world were also true for our family’s own ecosystem.

When I was four, my sister, Stephanie, was born and my father grew ambitious. We moved to the northern part of the state where he expanded his business to include pool and spa installation, perfecting his knowledge of pumps and pipes well past what would be expected of any pool man worth his salt. It was his pride to do this; if he could not be a college man, he’d be a superior tradesman, and he enjoyed reading manuals on the subject of waterworks and analyzing the topic at length. “Water is the most important thing in the world,” he’d say, and then he’d go on a tear about the extinction of civilization in the event of a superdrought. Though he didn’t come out and say it, I gathered our location over the Florida Aquifer was something he took personally, as if the entire system of underground caves, sinkholes, and springs existed as his own private reservoir to be accessed in case of emergency.

I am sorry to say I never paid much attention to my father’s lectures on hydraulics. I do, however, remember something remarkable that happened when I accompanied him to a job site once, when I was eight. It’s less remarkable now, having more knowledge of the world and having cracked a few of its mysteries, but at the time I considered my father’s actions to be nothing short of genius.

A customer’s neglected Jacuzzi had been overtaken by algal bloom and required draining, and my father, unable to yank out the bottom plug, used a hose to siphon it dry. “Watch this,” he said, submerging half the hose in the water.

He put his mouth to the dry end and sucked out the leftover air. Once the swill reached his lips he set the hose on the ground and went about other pump-related business, turning dials and knocking on the timer’s glass face, leaving me in awe of the putrid water pouring forth with no further manipulation or machinery. For all I knew, he’d invented the trick, and it instilled in me not only the belief that my father was the keeper of rare and valuable secrets, but that the very laws of nature bent to his will.

This prejudice gave way to other biases, each of them steeped in some vague notion of filial loyalty. I stopped visiting the city pool after deciding its concrete finish was inferior to that of vinyl liner membranes with plastic steps; my father had extolled the virtues of the latter (pliable, easy to clean, soft underfoot), and so I, too, shunned the alternatives. Even to this day the smell of polyvinyl chloride speaks to me like cornstalks call to the midwestern farm girl. Recently I’ve heard that it’s a noxious gas, a chemical bouquet that causes brain damage, and sometimes I...