The Accidental Florist

Mary and John. But there were some really good ones that cropped up occasionally. Carmina, Drew, Mick, Serena, and for a spell after the last version of the movie about the Titanic came out, there were lots and lots of first place Jacks and Roses.
    Early Tuesday morning Jane was awoken by the sound of her fence coming down. She’d forgotten to buy kitty litter and bins to see if they still remembered what they were for. She made a quick run to a pet store and discovered there was now a wonderful thing called “self-clumping kitty litter.“ Everything, including liquid, turned into a ball. You bought scoops with grooves through them, and lots of plastic bags. She was also told to get a box of baking soda and a fine sieve. Stir a tiny bit in every time you cleaned out the clumps and they wouldn’t smell bad—to the cats or the person cleaning up. The pet store manager suggested that she should buy two low-sided bins. Most cats didn’t want to use each other’s bins.
    When she returned home, she found a good-sized plastic container in an upper cabinet that would do for a generous water bowl. There was lots of noise outside and the cats had taken refuge in the basement, just as they always did during lightning storms.
    Todd and Shelley’s boy John were already outside loving the noise and lots of strong men with power tools.
    Jane made earplugs out of wadded-up tissues, and took her embarrassingly big bags of books outside to arrange them on the patio table in the shade of the umbrella. She laid them all out and started looking them over, one by one. There were very noisy digging machines carrying away a huge amount of soil and putting it into equally noisy trucks that took the dirt away. At the end of the day, there was an enormous hole in the backyard. At least four feet deep.
    The next day, she was out early to see what was going on next and found that work had stopped and there was a calico cat with two kittens looking down into the hole. The mother was meowing loudly and there was a sound of mewing coming out of the hole. A workman got in the hole and after a bit of a chase, lifted the little orange kitten out.
    The mother immediately started almost brutally washing the kitten, one paw holding it down. When the orange kitten was clean, she walked serenely out of the area of missing fence at the north end of the yard, three kittens running to catch up with her. Jane was smiling when the man who had rescued the kitten approached her.
    “We need to go into your basement to drill through for hot water, cold water, and hook up to the sewer line.“
    “I’ll have to get my own cats locked up or you’ll be stepping on them. They’re very curious.“
    “That’s fine. My workers need to get their tools out of the truck.“
    Jane hauled the kitty litter bins, a bowl of water, and cat food up to her bathroom, then went back down to fetch Max and Meow.
    By the time she returned there were horrible drilling noises coming from the basement again, and she went out to look down the hole.
    There were four men in it now, one was helping thread the pipes through from the basement, and the others were building restraining walls to keep the concrete from flowing over the yard, she assumed. But the hole would take tons and tons of concrete. Wouldn’t it be so heavy that the entire addition would gradually sink into the hole?
    The general contractor had arrived and was watching the workmen. She approached him and asked him about her fears of the whole thing sinking. He laughed and said, “It won’t be filled with concrete. It will be mostly gravel with a vapor barrier over it.“
    As he was explaining, a pipe appeared coming through the foundation closest to the far wall of the hole. “Which one is that?“ Jane asked.
    “Hot water,“ he said as somebody else in the hole was connecting a black pipe with a curve at the bottom and coming up very high. “It has to be higher than usual and all of them will be capped off higher than necessary.“
    “Why are they coming out from the dining room foundation?“
    “Because you don’t want anything that holds water on an outside wall or it could freeze and burst.“
    Jane almost said “Duh“ but John Beckman was used to people who hadn’t added a room before asking silly questions.
    By the time all the pipes were installed and capped off, she went to free the cats. When she got back downstairs, there were four men with heavily loaded bags of gravel in wheelbarrows. They