The water is getting turned on today. The water is the irrigation water. The water is diverted from the Yakima river and run through irrigation ditches all through the valley and then back to the river…watering crops and fields and doing amazing things. The water fills our pond, and we pull from it to water our pastures. The water comes from a very old inventive system and we’ve been dealing with having a bit (like a bloody swamp) of it where we didn’t want it since the first time they turned the water on shortly after we arrived two springs ago.
The problem comes from an old (perhaps 100 years old) wooden drain that runs through the farm and was cut off at some point years ago, forcing the drain water to puddle up behind the barn. Last year we unearthed (literally) the drain box and figured out where the water was coming from and were able to pipe it back to the ditch.
We wanted to stay ahead of the water. We finished off the piping, cut into the old drain (which is a very impressive thing considering how old it is) and built a new bigger box to capture the use of the water before sending it down to the ditch.
We could finally cover up the creek we’ve had running through the back of the barn every summer. We even had the tool to make the picking up and dumping of dirt easy…Blue.
Except…do you know, that when you are the driver of the tractor you cannot see what the loader part of the tractor is actually doing? Having My Loving Spouse ‘instruct’ me and tell me there was a certain ‘feel’ for it and levers that go away or forward, when we (male/female) are speaking two different languages, because my ‘forward’ was his ‘away’ and ‘can’t’ you see? Uhmmm, no I can’t…reminded me of my father teaching my mother to play golf (and that was not pretty).
In the end, the ditch got the dirt dumped on it. I got better at it and My Loving Spouse only had one near heart attack when he thought I was going to drive straight into the barn. The box is built, the pipe is in and we are ready…turn the water on!
Seeing you on Blue or Jubal always brings a smile to my face! 🙂
The mental image of Joe trying to teach Betty how to play golf brought a laugh and smile. Perhaps you in retrospect can understand better how much they meant to our lives than even our sons, who essentially took them for granted since they were always there even more than grandparents or aunts or uncles. And thank God that they were. Their memories are integral to our lives even yet.