Various Veins
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The way things act in this universe we inhabit, when anything except water is heated it swells up and shrinks when cooled. This constant movement results in lots of problems. When metal is bent, for example, after a number of flexings fatigue results in breakage. Wings can fall of airplanes, studs snap and wheels come off trucks. Both can be deadly.
Water swells when heated, shrinks when cooled, but a few degrees below freezing ice swells again. This is lucky in that if ice didn't float, in time the lakes and seas would be solid ice. It's not so lucky when ice is inside pipes, in crevices between bricks and pavement for example. It has power to split the strongest materials. This is why we are forever having to detour in summer while bridges, culverts and pavement are being replaced.
The gully washers we've been experiencing lately have been flooding basements through holes that metal fatigue, ice-split shingles and concrete walls have left.
Shingles are destroyed both by ice and by the buckling between nails or staples when the sun heats them. This opens mouth-like spaces which lets wind push rainwater up over the top edge of shingles. Depending on the slope and shapes of under-roof construction, water can find its way to places to drip that ruin ceilings leaving no hint of where the leak may be found. Often it falls right onto your bed.
For several months every heavy rain has tripped the ground fault breaker that protects people from being electrocuted in the gazebo or by the fish pond and security light in the back yard. When the water started flooding into the outdoor cellarway and down to the floor of the cold room, it offered a clue to locate the weak spot in the electrical circuit. Son Mike who has the most experience in things electrical advised looking in the box of the receptacle that's on the wall just above the concrete slab surrounding the trap door. He was right. The box was half full of soggy porridge-like gasket material. The dissolved gasket let water at the receptacle, rusting screws, etc.
I called on son David, he with the most experience in gasketry and caulking, to fix the problem. Gentle rain had no effect on the repair, but the next gully washer killed the circuit.
Examining the situation from inside the cellarway, we saw that the seasonal heating and cooling had broken the mortar and silicone all along the junction of the concrete top and the brick walls. Furthermore, the vent for the gas fireplace exits up through the concrete top tight to the brick wall. I had used black-coated ten test as a cushion for expansion of the metal housing. Over the years it had done the same as the gasketry in the electrical box, rotted to mush.
David used his air compressor to clean the decayed vegetation, chips of mortar and sundry debris before filling voids with hydraulic cement and replacing rotten ten test with modern backer material. I was watching him inject silicone over this material when a movement caught my eye.
It was an earthworm no thicker than a bit of string and just over an inch long throwing itself like a miniature sidewinder across the hot concrete. It must have been snug in a crevice filled with damp humus until the blast of compressed air ruined its home. If it had a voice it would have been expressing outrage like Robert Burns' wee mouse, and probably screaming as the sun and hot concrete reduced it to a bit of leather.
It was headed across the desert instead of toward the near edge where it would fall into the shade of ferns. Knowing my blunt fingers would kill it if I tried to pick it up, I nudged it toward safety. It coiled instantly into a writhing knot. That let me get it to the cliff with a couple of feather-light sweeps. It vanished among the fronds, still able, I hoped, to recover from its desiccation.
I wonder if the wee organism has a brain capable of feeling gratitude? Or fear? It appeared to have purpose as it hurried in search of shelter. Eyes would have been useless. On that flat surface it couldn't have seen the shortest path or detected the cliff.
It would have been carried off by one of the ants that roam the area, part of the food chain if I hadn't attempted a rescue.
Ironically I suppose, it may have fallen right into the jaws of an emmet under the ferns.