Twas the worst of mornings coming after one of the best of days. Yup, after a Thursday filled with euphoria from attending two neat events in our rural area, I met head on with reality yesterday morning---a very dirty reality.
While walking out to get the papers, I stopped by one of my flower spots to survey the growth of some seedlings I'd planted in the old wagon wheel, which has a story all its own.
While standing there, pleased that the tiny flowers seemed to be thriving, I looked over to the grass next to the area and noticed standing water.
Hmmm, it didn't rain over night. Then, I wondered if maybe I had inadvertently left the hose running after the previous day's watering.
Nope. That was not the cause.
So, I walked around some more and discovered that this water had made its way across the driveway through the culvert. A wide swath of lawn on the south lawn was wet, while the rest of the yard had only had a light morning dew.
Walking toward the road, I found what seemed to be the source of the water flow, right at our water meter.
Not a good sign.
So, I called Carla from Oden Water who said her son would be over soon. Then, I suggested Bill speed up his early morning activities and take his bath.
In the meantime, I filled several bowls with water for what could possibly be an in-house drought if the water was turned off for very long.
Fortunately, things happened fairly quickly. Garrett came, surveyed the situation, said there was probably a leak near the meter and that after the "call before you dig" folks came to do their thing, he'd be returning with an excavator.
Bad, bad word----"excavator"; not a shovel but an excavator! Visions of piles of yucky mud across my beautiful front lawn and the thoughts of just how extensive this could be changed my emotional gears from ultimate bliss to Irish fire.
Well, when the excavator arrived, I went out behind the barn and worked on my fencing project for the manure-pile garden. I did not want to witness the "my lawn is beautiful" carnage.
It was also for sure that my neighbor Janice from down the road was gonna get a big advantage on the Lovestead in this year's ongoing "lawn beautiful" competition.
Once, I peeked from behind the barn and saw two pickups at the end of the driveway. -Again, this was not a good sign. How many people do they need to fix this disaster, I thought. A two pick-up job could be pretty major.
Finally, I allowed myself to walk out to the area where Bill and our neighbor Randy from Oden Water were visiting while son Garrett was down in a hole digging and fingering through the gushy mud, trying to figure out the precise origin of the leak.
The hole dug by the excavator turned out to be much smaller than my mind had earlier envisioned. Garrett soon found the culprit---40-year-old pipe attached to the meter with one rather large hole and a few others.
This father-son team knows water and mud and pipes and all that stuff from under the ground as they've had to work with similar situations during all their years of association with the Oden Water District.
They also know water witching with willows, and that's what Randy used to figure out precisely where our main water line ran.
What looked like a disaster turned out okay. Garrett replaced the pipe and the meter box and then filled up the hole which was no longer an underground stream. Besides that, Bill and Randy and I accomplished a lot of neighborhood visiting.
A little work remains when things dry up a bit, raking and reseeding that area, but happily it all turned out okay, so I could return to a state of relative bliss AND, more importantly, so our upcoming water bill would not be astronomical.
Both are good things. Thanks to the Poelsta's for figuring out the problem and fixing it fast enough that I didn't need to use one drop of water from all those bowls in the kitchen.
And, yes, those little green things in the 100-plus-year-old wagon wheel are the baby flowers which seem to be doing just fine.
Happy Saturday.
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