I was the first to cross the flooded creek on the repaired access road.
By 3 o'clock yesterday afternoon I was plumb stir-crazy. Book orders had been piling up since Saturday afternoon--five orders came in yesterday alone--and I had to get out or lose my seller status. (And issue refunds...) I loaded myself and my packages into the pickup and sallied forth in a light rain. I crept up on the washout 2 miles west, but once I'd passed the view-obscuring junipers I could see a road grader making passes on a graveled patch. I rolled closer to the crossing, then stopped and got out. Soon the grader stopped, as well, and the worker climbed out carrying a shovel in one hand. I walked across to him and asked when the repair would be finished. "I'm just putting the finishing touches on now," he said. "You can follow me out."
And so I did.
And traveled north on the highway then 10 miles to Davis Creek and fetched my mail at the mercantile there and posted my packages and exclaimed with the patrons about the flooding and bizarre weather. I bought milk and dates and three large shiny Granny Smith apples for Brian's lunch, climbed back into the pickup, and went home, wipers slapping the windshield all the way.
And I forgot to buy Band-aids, so I do up my feet in gauze-and-duct-tape, quite attractive.
I made supper very early--4 o'clock--huge bean-and-rice burritos on flour tortillas I'd melted jack cheese on, with "Wild Wife" green sauce, chopped red onion, and sour cream. Grape juice for brother B., a splash of red wine in a glass of Pellegrino water for me.
And at 5 the sun emerged, and I squeezed into my Caterpillar work boots, duct tape and all, bungied a half-dozen steel fenceposts and a circle of old used barbed wire to my trusty red hand truck, and set off toward the neighbor's footbridge. It was an awkward hike through the grass and mud dragging tools and posts, dogs leaping and smiling far ahead, and at the other side of the bridge I shed my barn coat and beret. Regrouped. Trudged on.
Finally the mud became too soft to support heavily laden hand trucks. So I parked it where the wheels had stalled and made five trips from there to the work site, perhaps 200 feet through muck and over slippery ruined pond banks, carrying posts and wire and tools.
The "site": deep wet mud polka-dotted with clumps of bent-over brome, smashed reeds and cattails. One can stand on the clumps. And I did. And managed with much cursing and swearing and vowing, much imagining of a Supreme Being leaning over the tops of the not-really-retreating cumuli, the Very Male Deity smirking under his moustaches as he gazed down on me.
Six steel posts driven at 10-foot intervals deep into silt and mud. Two strands of old rusty wire suspended not very tightly between them. Wire that came uncoiled and became a hideous monster of stings and lashes. (Oh Sarpy Sam, you'd have laughed and laughed.)
I walked in my front door at precisely 8 p.m. Llamas secure. Blisters screaming. Mud from head to foot. But finished.
And I'll tell you, I walked in smiling. Because once I got out through the mud and hiked back around through the high wet grass in my wet muddy painboots and sweat, I stood for a while near the house and watched what was happening in the sky above the east ridge, over the pasture where I'd been working. The sun was already down in the west, but overhead the sky was still light. A strip of blue, and then heavy clouds retreating in the east. Black clouds. But where the slant light of the unseen sun caught the still-falling rain, misty fringes of brilliant gold shone suspended, illuminated, and rainbow within rainbow after rainbow manifesting and fading, blossoming and dying, as the system moved eastward. As I turned away I spotted low in the west the impossible moon, the first hint of a waxing crescent with its companion planet faithful and bright at its left hand, so bright, the two of them, behind scraps of cloud.
Comforting Transcendent Mother brushing her sweet hands through my hair.
And then I finally latched the front door behind me, and new rain was falling.
11:17:02 AM 
|
