Lowe’s was such a wonderful place to go for all of your home improvement needs. It just has that clean sterile feeling; I miss that. But, I will always remember Lowe’s for a different reason… that first fight with my ex-wife. You know the fight I am discussing, everyone has this fight at some point in their life, that first home improvement project in your new house fight. For you it could have been a husband, but the fight is the same: “We should get this one because [insert their reason].” Then you say: “But that [their reason] isn’t really that important my [insert your reason] is much more practical.” I still remember her reason, it was based on the cost over time, and she was correct.
“Jeffery! That one is going to break in five years. We should get the one that will last twenty years.”
The sales man was there; so I didn’t want to tell her why I didn’t want to do the twenty year Brita filter, “Yea, but the five year one is two thousand dollars and the twenty year one is eight thousand dollars. They break down to the same price.”
She shook her head, “Not once you factor in the installation costs. The twenty year one has free installation, if we did four five year filters we would pay four installation costs.”
The sales man jumped in at this point with some useless information, “The flow rate on the twenty year filter is two gallons per a second faster. That’s a lot of water.” Only really rich people needed to filter water at such high speeds. I was laughing on the inside at his trivial knowledge or ability to realize that we didn’t need to filter that much water. What were we… pool owners?
This is why I loved my wife, “Flow rates don’t matter. You think we own a hot tub?” With the sale man slayed like a dragon, she turned her attention onto me, “Listen, you know it makes more sense for us to go with the twenty year purchase. It will add value to the house.”
“And if we move in five years?” I wanted to tell her why I didn’t want the twenty year filter, but I knew the salesman would have some script to fire back at such a response.
“We will recoup the losses. You know people hate buying Brita filters. We could even make money on the deal.”
I had to risk it, even if it led to a long winded monologue, “My dad’s first filter, you know when the Pure filters came on the market? It was a fifty—”
“Those were amazing filters, my family still has theirs and it runs like a top.” The salesman was beaming.
Without realizing it, I was turned towards him and yelling, “Get them off that filter! You can’t have them use that filter! Damn thing was obsolete in five years, nearly killed my grandma!” He tried to mumble something, but I was still screaming, “Save your family! Don’t let them drink the water!”
My ex-wife grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back. With my labored breathing she cooed into my ear, “We’ll get the five year filter.” She understood what I had refused to say at the beginning of the discussion, but now we were in agreement. Our fights would be less civilized from then on out, but technically, that was our first “disagreement”.
With the two thousand dollars in the man’s hands, we grabbed our pickup truck and loaded the filter into the bed. We needed to use bungee cords because it was slightly larger than we had anticipated. In the end, I installed it myself and our entire house’s water system was safe from the toxins. That was our first major purchase. I wish it was easier at the end, but when it came to kids we were never in agreement.
“I want children.” This was the one where she left me. She had prompted the conversation with that phrase. It was two years since the first Brita filter, and we were already on our third due to the need to handle the new toxins in the water. It turned out that my dad’s experience was being accelerated. However, I digressed from the point. It was weird, we had a marble kitchen table with soft black leather chairs, and I remember everything about that conversation like a hot brand on a cattle’s hind quarter. I remember the uncomfortableness of this conversation being broached for the fifth time in the month; that nervousness translated to a squeak in the leather as I shifted my weight – it sounded like flatulence. I kept my face buried in my pasta, and contemplated how so many pieces of food could remained untangled as I twirled my fork. Each layer slithered around the fork, and then, I popped it into my mouth. My eyes were still downturned, and she cleared her throat to draw them up and into a conversation. She was tapping her finger and continued once she had my attention, “We aren’t putting a pin in this… nope, not this time.”
“I don’t want kids.” I was cold; I blinked five times and continued chewing.
Before I could return to the food at hand, she drew me back, “I know you don’t want children. I want children. What are we going to do about this? You know I love you, but I can’t sit here waiting for you to come around.”
At this point of lunch, I looked out onto the back yard. A reservoir of “clean” water was surrounded by dying grass. It was odd, even though all the grass was the same species, the grass was growing in patches. Even thinking about it now, as I sit here on that same grass, I am finding beauty in the different stages of decay. You see, some was red (this was the really dead stuff, not even a tint of green poked through the dead cells), then there were some browns, and finally the most vivid green. Obviously, due to the water from the rain, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that there was very little green and the bulk of the grass was red with a spectrum of brown moving through the two colors. Oddly, I found that fabric of a lawn touching in a way. Every year from then on out, I would stare at that grass and be impressed at how the green was beginning to overtake the red and brown. Then again, grass has a shorter life cycle so it was able to adapt to the environment.
After my nice reprieve from my wife, I turned to her and answered like I always do, “I won’t have children until they solve that.” I pointed at the dead landscape in our backyard. While some survived, it was clear that the world was paying for our transgressions.
“Science will get to it.”
“I agree, but I want to know for a fact they will before I add more children to this doomed world.”
Science never got it. Obviously if you are reading this, you know that science wasn’t able to fix the water issues. As our polluting hit a critical mass, the countries without money to purify water were turned into ghost countries. All their top educated individuals were pilfered and they worked on correcting the issues created by others. With each innovation, with each poison cleaned, we were left with a worse byproduct. Add in the way our world moves water from one location to another, and BAM, we all had to have Brita filters in our homes. Yet, those even produced toxins. But, I am getting ahead of myself.
She rebutted, “Listen, I’m getting older, and I know science will solve the problem. Look, Cindy is having her first kid. Her husband—”
“I don’t care about Cindy!” I was fed up and screamed.
“You listen here. You let me finish.”—Her tone made my testes shoot into my throat like an Apollo mission to the moon. Even if I agreed to whip up some children, it would take gravity five days to dislodge them from their hiding place. She was standing as she finished her reason—“Cindy’s husband is part of the agricultural collective over the old fed building. They are working on this day and night. If she got pregnant, you can bet your ass that they are close.”
I was done at this point. I know that is horrible to say, but my balls dropped like an anvil on a cartoon character, “They were close the last five thousand times. I think we need to take a break from one another.” I stood, walked over to the sink, dropped off my plate (the garbage disposal devoured my pasta), and then just sauntered out into the garage and drove off. The next thing I know, I was served with divorce papers. After signing them, you won’t believe this, as a newly single man about to move back in with my parents, an amalgam of feelings hit me. No, it wasn’t the divorce or the fact that I would have to live in my parent’s basement. It was the fact that she was dead.
Joy and profound sadness. And the worst was that they tried to exist at the same point in time. Each day, it was a shot to the gut or a playful skip in my step. I just didn’t understand how I could be happy that someone I had loved for over six years was dead. Then again, the man I am today is not the man that existed six years ago. Physically we are the same, but I am not him. In the end, she was calling my hopeless… looks like I was right! That’s what I told myself over and over. In the end, I justify it by being gratefully that she couldn’t fulfill her desire of bringing children into our doomed world. Hell, even the water was trying to kill us at this point.
And now we are here, I am in a tarp, in my yard, trying to use the only clean water I have left to wash my body. Ever drop goes right back through the old Brita filter – they stopped making them years ago. Not because humanity gave up, no, no, humanity tried until there were only a few of us. For a while, a good amount of us talked and discussed new ways to conserve water but it was hopeless. With each rainfall, the toxins from one location would mix with the ones in your location. Until, you had a solid murder juice.
I find it odd, as I write these words for the next person, I can’t help but wonder what I will do now that my Brita filter has given out. The irony doesn’t escape me. It has been five years since my last purchase, and I can’t help but wonder if the twenty year model would still be running like a top. Every time I drink this soapy water, I hear her voice, “We would save on instillation costs!” Oh yes, and I would maybe get another four to five years out of life. I guess this is the way it goes.
God, I am thirsty.