Pipe by Pipe

Art and Plumbing

May 17, 2026

I arrived in Maine on Sunday night to find that the water filter on the well pump had frozen and burst over the winter. I could run the bypass, turning on the water and justifying it in my mind that it would be okay because the filter had been put on last year and the house had survived 80 years without one. Monday morning, I picked up a new filter housing and installed it, thinking that I had avoided the worst of it. I don’t know yet what that cost me because I haven’t gotten the bill.

My original plan was simple: replace the kitchen sink. I’d been wanting to do it for a while. I hate a double basin sink and the motley tangle of leaking copper, PVC, PEX, and galvanized pipes under the counter was a dripping and ticking time bomb. This seemed like a good opportunity to defuse that situation. The outline was to get up there, swap the sink, enjoy Maine, and make art.

That simple plan did not survive contact with the pipes.

The plumbing system is old and the well is deep and muddy, and over the winter the accumulated decades of silt in the pipes had solidified at various points like cholesterol in an artery. Every shut-off valve was packed solid with mud. Most of the pipes were completely blocked and in some cases, there was actual gravel in the lines. So my simple sink swap morphed into disassembling the shutoff valves for the bathroom sink, bathtub, toilet, kitchen sink, and the washing machine, because they were all full of mud. I used a double-pointed knitting needle to pull the gunk out of some of the smaller pipes, which makes me feel both resourceful and completely unhinged.

The mud had also destroyed O-rings, washers, and gaskets. The plumbing in this house is a glorious hodgepodge — things replaced at different times, adapters stacked on adapters, the plumbing equivalent of a run-on sentence. Three-eighths-inch pipe meeting half-inch pipe via a chain of increasingly questionable connectors. I was adding to this legacy, by the way. Good plumbing happens for me more by accident than by design.

If you are thinking, “She has a house in Philadelphia and a house in Maine. What is she complaining about?” I’ve had cancer three times. It is reasonable to assume that I may not make it to a traditional retirement. Jim and I made choices — we live frugally on a tight budget and I cobble together art-related work so that I can have the time and the place now. I also took this lesson from my mother, who expected that she would be able to travel and do all sorts of things she had put off until retirement, only to find that her body was letting her down and she died without achieving many of her goals. Like the old song says, “Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.”

Which is why I found myself on Tuesday standing in a muddy bathroom with no running water, no idea what the plumber was going to cost, and a Wednesday appointment at Carver Hill Gallery to drop off and pick up work where I really needed to be presentable and not an olfactory embarrassment.

I had showered on Sunday morning before I left Philadelphia. By Tuesday afternoon, having spent two days crawling under sinks, inside walls, and through the basement, I was not exactly fresh. The house had muddy tracks all through it. There were muddy towels strewn about. I had pipes open everywhere, which meant I had to shut off the water at the source, and had no running water at all. I had no idea if the plumber was even going to make it before Wednesday.

By Monday night I was hitting a wall. There were things I couldn’t figure out. There were nuts I couldn’t loosen because I just don’t have the hand strength, and elsewhere I was stripping threads and cross-threading fittings and making certain situations worse. I hate sweating pipes (the verb, that is). My solder beads are ugly. This quickly was becoming a situation beyond my plumbing acumen. I called a plumber (the only one on the island) because I recognized the difference between a problem I could solve and a problem I was actively making worse.

Tuesday morning, I was working on it and getting nowhere fast, and I went outside to do some yard work just to reset my brain. I started thinking about Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott’s book about writing. The title comes from a story about her brother, who had a report on birds due the next day and was completely overwhelmed. Their father sat down with him and said, “Just take it bird by bird. Don’t think about all the birds. Just this bird. Then the next one.”

Standing in the yard, I thought, “Okay. Bird by bird. Valve by valve. What is the single most important fixture to get working? If I can get a shut-off valve on one section, can I turn the house water back on even partially? What’s the minimum viable plumbing situation that gets me to Wednesday without offending anyone at the gallery?”

(The toilet, it turns out, is always the answer to “What do you fix first?” Luckily, I had sorted that one out before the mud issue really metastasized.)

I drove to the local hardware store and spent an hour assembling a Frankenstein collection of shut-off valves and adapters, because — of course — the configuration I needed was the exact opposite of every configuration they stocked. Half-inch intake, three-eighths output? Sorry, we have the other one. I bought adapters for the adapters. I am a creative person and got creative.

Bird by bird. Sink by sink. Line by line.

There’s something else that helped, though I didn’t fully register it until later. My internal voice has gotten kinder. Not so long ago, a stripped thread or a valve I couldn’t budge would have set off a whole internal monologue: “You stupid idiot, Kate. How did you not know that? What is wrong with you, %&** $&#**?” Now it sounds more like: “Okay, be patient. You can figure this out. You’re smart. Let’s take it one thing at a time.”

I talk to myself the same way when I’m painting. “What does this need? What color goes here? That’s not right — what would fix it?” The conversation is ongoing and mostly gentle, and I think that’s part of why the work gets done. You can’t berate yourself into solving a problem. You can, it turns out, talk yourself through one.

A word about tools: in my plumbing odyssey, I spent money on a handle-puller. That’s an actual plumbing tool. (Most plumbing terminology sounds faintly risqué, like it was designed to make 13-year-old boys giggle. You apply dope to the male end of your threads before screwing it into the female end. You do this with a straight face because you are trying to be professional. Also: caulk.) The handle-puller is something I will probably use twice in my life, but it was the tool for the job.

This is true of art supplies, too. Sometimes you have to buy the thing you’ll only use once or twice because there is simply no other way to make the thing you’re trying to make. And sometimes that tool takes you somewhere you didn’t expect to go. Who knows what handles I may yet pull?

The plumber arrived while I was mid-mud extraction. When I told him the lines were full of mud, he gave me a look I can only describe as patient skepticism — the look of a man who has encountered many people From Away who don’t like brown water and are being dramatic about it. Then he looked under the bathroom sink. His expression changed.

What the plumber saw- mud in the water line.

We worked together for the rest of the day. I even loaned him a knitting needle, which was a novel tool for him. At one point there was a shut-off valve that I had been completely unable to budge — no strength, wrong tool, not enough leverage. He couldn’t get it either. He went back to his truck and returned with a two-foot-long pipe wrench, and even then he was grunting with effort. I felt vindicated. There was no version of reality in which I was getting that valve off with my eight-inch wrench and arthritic lady hands. There was another task that required us to work in tandem from opposite sides of a wall — me standing in the bathtub and him in the bedroom closet, which I obviously could not have achieved alone.

When we finished, he said: “If you’d been able to do all this yourself, I would have offered you a job.”

I thought, “If I’d been able to do all this myself, you wouldn’t be here and you’d never have known to offer me a job.” But I appreciated the sentiment. I think he meant that I hadn’t done a terrible job with the knowledge and tools I had, which I am choosing to take as a compliment.

We now have a new kitchen sink. Single basin. Hot and cold running water with decent pressure. I love it.

After all that, I was able to take a hot shower and wash my hair. The next morning I drove down to Camden to deliver the artwork and I picked up a check for art sales that will help cover whatever that plumber bill turns out to be. I stopped to paint on my way back from dropping off the artwork.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: the bird-by-bird thing works. When the whole problem is too big and too expensive and too muddy to look at directly, you don’t look at the whole problem. You look at the piece in front of you. What can I solve right now? What’s the most important thing? What’s the minimum I need to get to the next step?

Sometimes the answer is: go outside and pull weeds for twenty minutes.

Sometimes the answer is: buy the handle-puller. Be kind to yourself and have a gentle inner monologue.

Someday, when I am older and have bloomed into my older art lady wackiness, I want to walk into the hardware store and ask with loud confidence, “Where are all your silicone caulks?” [snicker]

Now back to making some art.

Rabbit Island, 20 x 20 inches, oil on panel

Carver Hill Gallery — WATER

I’m happy to share that I have work in the 2026 Summer Season opening exhibition at Carver Hill Gallery in Camden, Maine. WATER brings together photography, painting, and sculpture from a group of artists exploring the many faces of water — how it moves, how it holds still, what it carries emotionally. The work ranges from haunting and dramatic to quietly serene..

I’ll have eleven Deer Isle-based landscapes in the show — paintings made from that particular stretch of the Maine coast, where water is never far from view.

Artists in the show: Emily Freeman, Jim Westphalen, Whitney River, Angela Warren, Evan McGlinn, Kate Kern Mundie, Theresa Girard, Philip Frey, and Traci Harmon-Judy.

The show runs through June 14th. The gallery is open seven days a week — Monday through Saturday, 11–5, and Sunday, 11–4. If you’re in Camden this spring or early summer, I’d love for you to see the work in person. You can find artist pages and more information at carverhillgallery.com.