We don’t have to be up at 4:30 today! Yeah!!! But I wake up at 5:00 anyway, so I get to blog. Excited about that. It is hard to find the time to keep this diary entered every day. Without the water, chores are taking longer than normal and a schedule like mine doesn’t have room for errors. Shelly brings CJ over today to play with the kids one more time before he starts school on Tuesday. He thinks it’s kind of exciting not having water. I wish I could see it all through his mind. The kids act like they are camping; brushing their teeth with bottles water, failing to wash their hands at all, peeing outside just beyond the fence. Oh yeah, it’s all fun, fun, fun for them. All I can see is dirt. I like to think that with my skills at adaption to trying situations like this I would be able to survive in the 1800’s. This little trial is making me think differently. I like water. I like electricity. I like to shave my legs!
At 8:30 I get more water from Dick’s house. He is still calm and supporting as always. I get to shower, and though this may seem to personal, I did get to shave my legs. I think that is the first time I’ve actually smiled in three days. On the way back home it starts to rain. This is odd. I don’t recall a chance of rain today. We don’t need rain on the crops, but secretly I’m hoping it hits my yard! I missed so many fertilizer dates with my yard this year so it wasn’t emerald green like I like it to be anyway. This lack of water has made it positively brown. I close my eyes when I walk in the house now so that I don’t have to see the brown patches! But the rain, ahhh, the rain. I will never tell Wave that I rolled down my window and smelled the air and smiled. Luckily, it did rain at our house, but not on the crops, so I take a lunch out to Wave and manage to sneak in a ride since Jack is at Grandma Jan’s for the rest of the afternoon. On the way to Wave I throw kids out at the pool – that is my favorite term in the summer – I throw them out. They discovered that the pool closes for good on Wednesday. My heart sinks a little. Summer is officially over. It is usually over for this family when harvest starts, but this year harvest was late, so we got a taste of summer during the dog days of August. I don’t think I’m ready to let it go just yet!
After the ride, I go back home, retrieve Brett and take him to Wave so that he can learn to drive the big trucks and rush home again to fix a flat tire on the bus that we will be taking to the fair – yes, I said bus, don’t ask! The battery on the bus was dead, so I gave up on the tire and washed dishes instead. It was a long, arduous process, but at least there were no kids here so I got to turn up the radio and relax. Once I finished that, I picked up the kids from the pool, took CJ home so that he could go to football practice, and then went to Tekoa to work pigs. Brett finally coaxed them all into being weighed by offering them a whole bag of marshmallows! One was 255. The two others look they might be 280. That is very good news but we are thining of holding off on the marshmallows for the two larger ones from now one. If they go over 300 pounds before next week they are out of the fair.
As we leave the FFA barn, we notice a pressure in the air that was not there before. They called for a 30% chance of rain, but this feels different. If I lived in Tornado Alley I would have been scared. We shower at Grandma’s and as we are leaving it begins to rain. I love my Grandma. She is so sweet to us. She always has a smile on and towels ready. She is always calm and caring even amidst our stink and stress. She tells us stories of when Grandpa worked at the pig barn and the kids laugh. I hope I can be that way when my kids have a crisis.
As we leave, it rains just a little at first, but by the time we get home the wind is blowing something fierce. I call the guys on the radio to see how it is out in the field. It’s fine so far. It’s then that the lightening strikes. I tell Chad that if the wind starts blowing his has about five minutes before the rain. Chad says it has already started to blow, and is just about to say there is no rain when he says, “Forget it. It’s here.”
Wave makes the executive call that they will stay out there until the field is done. They are so close there is no point in stopping now. I rush to get steaks on the Bar-b-que, hopeful that I can make it before it’s full of water. The rain is pouring in buckets, the wind is raging, and dark has fallen early. The kids are excited with their flashlights and umbrella’s. Brett holds one over the bar-b-que every time I have to open it to flip the steaks. I’m going on feel here, because I can’t tell if the steaks are red of black anymore and frankly I don’t care. I can hear the guys on the radio laughing every time the lightening strikes, but we all have the same feeling. You do not want to be the tallest metal object in a field in a storm like this. Ken calls for 34 and then before he gets his question or comment out we hear him say, “Oh shit! That was too close!” 34, Chad, responds by saying, “I’m heading down to the ditch.”
We hold our breath for a moment, letting the steaks burn. Our minds are full of images that I do not want to imagine. Rain is bad enough. Being trapped in a combine on a hill in a lightening storm takes the adventure out of everything. Finally, they are laughing again and I have time to pull the steaks off. They are black, but we don’t care. We eat and go to bed with our flashlights in hand.
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