Life is full of reminders that trouble can lurk just below the surface

Iam not going to blame the plumber for having made a 19-by-19-inch hole in the living room wall in an attempt to locate a pipe running up from the basement, an ugly, gaping hole that sent an unwelcome draft through the room.

He did locate the pipe, it happened, but for reasons I only dimly understand, it was not the way to repair the problem, a leaking pipe in the basement. So the hole was made needlessly, although as it was explained to me, this could not have been anticipated.

I am not going to blame the plumber for the fact that his cutting through the plaster and the thick metal mesh and the wood lathe in the centuryold house caused dark and heavy dust to float and land all around the room.

I am not going to blame the plumber because he is conscientious and careful and as unobtrusive as someone can be when he is doing the work that plumbers do — and he was doing his job as neatly as was possible, under the circumstances.

But here’s the thing: What the plumber did was to make my house feel like something other than a home. And I hated that.

I hated that the hole exposed what to me were the dark innards of the house — the way once, when I cut through the webbed area between the thumb and forefinger of my left hand with a kitchen knife, I hated seeing my insides.

Intact is cheering; intact is the way things are supposed to be. Broken is not.

I washed the baseboard and floor beneath the hole and set boards against the wall to block the draft.

An armchair camouflaged the hole, but I knew it was there. And to me, there was something menacing about that. Until the hole was patched and plastered some days later, I avoided the room entirely.

A couple of years ago, the refrigerator started to make an odd clicking noise, which I ignored until it became a disconcerting grinding sound and eventually the fridge stopped cooling entirely. The repairman knew right away what it was; it had something to do with a pipe and a fan, he explained, although I confess I was not really listening and wanted only to know if he could fix it.

He could, he said. But when he took apart the freezer at the bottom of the fridge, I was dismayed to see that beneath the plastic interior, the fridge was essentially Styrofoam — a glorified picnic cooler with a motor.

Living in a house that has been standing for 100 years means living in a solid, wellbuilt structure, but it also means living in a place where something can go wrong at any time. And things do: A couple of years ago, the brick pillars supporting the secondfloor balcony at the front of the house had to be replaced because water infiltration meant the whole structure was in danger of imminent collapse. So, even though it was December, it had to come down, scaffolding had to go up, and the unhappy bricklayers had to work in freezing temperatures.

Without a balcony or pillars, the house looked the way a person looks when he has lost all his teeth. I’d come home at the end of the day to a place that seemed sad and forlorn and entirely unwelcoming. It’s a first-world problem. I know that. But it bothered me to see how fine the line is between a structure that is intact and one that is not — home, body or kitchen appli- ance.

We want to think of home as sanctuary, a place where we feel safe and protected from the harshness of the outside world. It can be snatched from us at any moment, of course, just like good health or the work we do or anything, indeed, that helps us to define ourselves.

We do not dwell on this, and that is as it should be: To focus on how everything could be lost in a heartbeat is too dark a notion to carry around with us. Still, it’s worth reflecting on, I believe — if for no other reason than to be reminded to appreciate what we do have. We forget. We shouldn’t.