We were in a pickle!

The year was about 1976.  Paula and I had been married for about four years, and had been living in a new home we had built for only about a year.  I had been out of town on business, and, driving down our street, I noticed a green liquid running in the street next to the curb.  I drove into our driveway and saw that the green liquid was coming from under our garage door!  Getting out of my car, I further saw that the green liquid looked like a green slush, and that it smelled...like dill pickles!  I opened the garage door and followed the trail into the hot-water heater closet in the garage.  Erupting from the drain next to the hot water heater was a fountain of green slush!  It was running out of our garage, down the driveway and down the street.  What in the world could be going on in our house???

I opened the door from the garage to the laundry room and walked into the kitchen, where I saw Paula, standing there, singing and plopping 'reject' pickles into the garbage disposal, one at a time, with the water running.  There were empty pickle jars all over the kitchen.  She was just about finished with the pickle demolition, and she shut the water off.  The house reeked of dill pickles! I asked her, as calmly as I could, what she was doing, and she happily told me that the batch of pickles had not turned out as she had hoped, and she was putting them down the drain. 

The pickles, although ground into a mush by the garbage disposal, overloaded the disposal and clogged the drain.  It seems that the drains in the average home are not adequate for the flushing of 45 to 50 quarts of dill pickles -- even if they are now mush!

We spent the evening cleaning pickle mush out of the heater closet and garage and then hosed down the driveway and tried our best to flush the pickle mush in the street WAY DOWN the street.  We sort of accomplished our goal, but, needless to say, the pickle mush gave our street a certain distinctive smell for a few days.We called the plumber and when he saw what had happened, told us in no uncertain words that he had never seen anything like this in all his years as a plumber.  He worked for a long time, cleaning out our drains. I 'relished' the thought of the cost of the plumbing work.

We got over the pickling of our home and neighborhood, and eventually, our neighbors forgave us.  The jokes, at Paula's expense, however, lingered for years. Even now, she's occasionally referred to as a DILL-lightfully nice lady!  Paula is a good cook, and knows her way around a kitchen really well. She has not ever attempted to whip up a batch of pickles again. Nevertheless she is good with 'pickles'...of the situational variety. In the years since the dill pickle fiasco, I must confess that my lovely wife has gotten ME out of a few 'pickles.' She's a great wife!...my little 'baby dill.'

'Nuff said!