One winter, when we were back at the old house, we came down to the basement one morning and the floor looked so shiny – it was covered with a one-inch deep layer of water. It was too shallow to empty with buckets, but leave it to native ingenuity, we soon swept it up in dust pans; from there into buckets and down the drain.
The cause was two cracks in the foundation, which I alleviated by digging a hole outside the foundation with the help of the boys (did they love the idea of digging to China!) and then smearing the crack with tar. We did this for both cracks, and then filled in the holes. Of course the digging was done the following summer.
Sometimes we are faced by seemingly insurmountable problems, but as we pray in the Credo, we believe in divine communication, “the communion of saints,” and my little tykes had no idea where I got my resourceful solutioms.
Civilization 