Spending quality time in my crawl space

A story I first told on 10 May 2017. It’s a good story, so I’m telling it again. I no longer live in a house that has a crawl space, hallelujah, amen. We’ve had a lot of rain lately. Days on end it has fallen. Inside my house, it was strangely quiet. It should not have been. My sump pump should have been running, and I should have heard it. Dagnabbit — that meant it had pumped its last. The old, failed sump pump sitting on my deck. Which tells you where this story is going. I’m not deeply experienced in the ways of sump pumps. My last house had one. It was there when we moved in, and it pumped faithfully for years. The crawl space was always a little damp, but that pump kept it from being wet. That wasn’t enough to satisfy my wife, so we had a perimeter drain dug, an additional sump pump sunk, and the whole place encapsulated. Holy frijoles, was that ever expensive. Point is, however, that I never personally had anything to do with our pumps. I didn’t even know what one looked like.…