64°f this morning, about 17°C. Pleasant but humid. Cloudy all day.
Absolutely the wrong time of year for it, I suppose, but with so much mincemeat in the cellar I decided to make a pie. I learned that mincemeat is apparently good any time of year! This was a nice treat.
Rain is predicted almost every day the rest of this week, and for the past several days too. For all of that, all we have had is a tiny drizzle for 10 minutes yesterday morning. The frustration is wearing. Everyone we see talks about rain, how little we've had, how much we need it, who is getting it, how dry the fields are, how desperate the gardens are. The truck accessory of choice these days is a large plastic water tank as wells go dry, cisterns are drained, creekbeds are stony, and springs quit running.
Some farmers are selling off some of their cattle because they have no way to get enough water to them. Some people are giving up on their gardens because they can't afford to keep watering. There will be no second or third cutting of hay, and field corn may not be worth harvesting. It's bad around here, folks.
But the county fair is happening this week. Normally during fair week we can expect it to be stormy, turning the fairgrounds into a muddy mess. Our friend Don is here from Arizona, and usually whenever he comes we get lots of rain, making the trail--can't really call it a road-- to his cabin inaccessible except by tractor or ATV. This time, neither Don or the county fair has been able to attract the rain. Maybe what we need is for granddaughter Sarah to come for a visit, because inevitably it will pour for days when she is here!
We are fortunate to have a very deep well (723 feet, to be exact) that the well driller said could easily supply 5 houses without any trouble. I say fortunate, but that well was pretty costly at the time we had it drilled in 1990. It cost over $10,000 then. We sold some acreage to drill it, because the old spring we had relied on for 16 years kept shifting and drying up, and the 1/3 mile of pipe and the pump-and-gravity feed system we used to get the water to the house had constant problems.
So we are watering daily, shifting hoses from garden to garden, trying to keep as much alive as we can. It is wearing, as any of you going through this know. But I know it could be worse, and my heart really goes out to those who can't do what we're doing.
After yesterday's hard work, we had a little break today, going into town to pay our annual taxes (ouch), visit our friend Rachel, stop at the thrift store to browse the used books, pick up a few things at the store, and have a late lunch at one of the two Mexican restaurants.
Then it was home to, you guessed it, water once again. July has always been my least favorite month, and this one sure sealed that!
Copyright Susanna Holstein. All rights reserved. No Republication or Redistribution Allowed without attribution to Susanna Holstein.
