Peace in gallons per minute

I recently took a trip to visit friends, “those” friends, the kind of married friends who get along — even while installing plumbing.

It’s sick and a measure of my capacity for tolerance that I like them anyway.

When walking through their house and seeing all the remodeling projects they’ve mastered, it’s beyond my comprehension to think of the genuinely reasonable discussion and negotiation skills they demonstrate to complete these projects amicably — without intervention from a mediator, counselor or divorce attorney.

My husband, John, and I can’t clean the kitchen together after supper without a half-dozen miscommunication incidents that, together, eventually result in one or the other of us just sighing (or swearing) and taking over the project as a one-spouse operation, while the other one retreats to the office, also known as the demilitarized zone.

Even talking about plumbing in our house ends up with a call to the U.N. Peacekeeping Commission to keep them updated on the status of internal relations, in case they need to send in an armed squad of multi-national forces, maybe set up an embargo.

Our friends have — among other projects — remodeled their kitchen and two bathrooms, which are notable as the rooms featuring the heaviest concentration of plumbing.

They are planning another kitchen remodel with an expansion that will involve the laundry room. They speak of that future work with longing and something that looks suspiciously like the camaraderie of unified thinking.

I don’t know what that is about. Not for sure, anyway.

But I have my suspicions.

Their downstairs bathroom has a heated bathtub, with water jets. The tub is so big it would comfortably hold two people. Sure, it was splashy (pardon my pun) but I was like, “Yuuuck. Why waste that much water in a bathtub where you’re just sitting around in the muck and soap you just washed off your body? Besides, you’d have to put two people in there so you didn’t use up so much water, and then you’re sitting around in that person’s washed off muck, too!”

I'm not a big fan of baths. It's also important to point out that our well puts out only 2 gallons of water per minute. It would take me a half-hour to fill that tub and without our pressure tank, I’d have better luck showering with a super shooter water cannon.

Their other bathroom is equally ridiculous with a huge custom-built and tiled shower equipped with two shower heads, and when I say two, I don’t mean you turn on the water and get hosed down by two water sources. I mean, it’s a shower with two separate showering stations.

At my house there’s only enough pressurized water for one person to hustle through the cleaning process. And in our tiny shower, bathing together would just be asking for someone to slip and take a tumble out on the floor — then there wouldn’t be enough water pressure left to clean up the inevitable head wound.

Obviously, their shower had lots of room, but I was like, “Dudes, your lives aren’t so busy you both have to shower at the same time to get out the door.” Really, she’s a computer geek who works at home and he’s in maintenance/management so showers after work, at his leisure in the evening. “Besides,” I added, “who can possibly run two—” wait a minute.

That’s when it dawned on me: the secret of their cooperative togetherness and their hearts and flowers and compromises marriage.

They have, like, a bajillion gallons of water per minute gushing out of their well. They don’t have to be careful. They don’t have to be conservative. They can be carefree, wasteful even. They could fill their whole house with water and call it a swimming pool then have a barbecue with friends while sitting pool-side on their window sills.

No wonder they have the sunny dispositions of tropical islanders.

(I know. You thought I was going to say that they have two shower heads because they couldn’t agree on which way to face the shower. That would be funny, but the truth isn’t that ugly at [email protected].)