Reminiscing About Water

Well, I have spent most of my "free time" the past 4 days patching jeans! I know there are many people that don't care how many holes there are in their jeans, but I prefer my family to wear hole free clothes. Keeping 4 boys (and a husband) in relatively clean clothes has been quite a chore around here.

I remember back to a few days after we moved up here ... Jim and the boys were somewhere else and I was sitting on a lawn chair in front of our pop up camper, pretreating and sorting the filthy clothes I needed to take to town the next day to the laundromat. Wow, was that expensive! I think I even paid as high as $35/week just to use their washers and dryers! All of a sudden I looked up at the sound of a truck; it was a UPS truck driving up through the field! I couldn't believe he had found us up in the middle of nowhere! What a treat to see something of civilization. He was only delivering a catalog that Jim had ordered, but it gave me someone new to talk to.

The soil up here has a clay base to it, so whenever there is the least amount of moisture we have mud. I should have been used to it as it was the same in Fargo, but it was one of life's little irritations for the person trying to keep the boys clean. Since then I have learned that they don't have to start out every day with perfectly clean clothes, as the only one that cared was me. I'm just thankful that no one sees their underwear, since there are so many minerals and rust in the water that anything white gradually turns an interesting shade of beige. Don't even try to use bleach, as then the whites turn orange! I am thankful to have learned about a laundry product called "Yellow Out," as it really works. I just wait until they are so bad that I can't stand them any more, and then use the product.

While we were living in the pop up camper we hauled water from the state park, since we didn't have a well. Talk about learning to conserve water! We got our money's worth out of that state park pass, since we headed to the park's restroom facilities every 3-4 days for showers. What a change for a former city girl that was used to showering every day! By the end of our travels over there I developed a good case of athlete's foot from using their shower, but thankfully some herbal salve eventually took care of it.

Our well was successfully drilled shortly before moving into our basement; we hit water at approximately 250 feet. That was such an exercise of faith for us, as one well driller we considered wanted us to witch for water. Neither Jim nor I felt good about doing that, so we declined and checked into another driller. Originally Jim had thought the well should be drilled in one location, but the day the drillers arrived with their rig he felt impressed from the Lord to change the location to another one. I think it took at least 3 days for the men to find water. The day the drillers came back to bring the water into the basement (working as the man who dug our basement was doing the trenching) the assistant told me how surprised he and the other driller had been that we had even hit water. For one thing, he showed me that just a few inches from the hole there was a huge rock that would have ruined the point and caused some delays in continuing with the drilling; for another, he said they had tried drilling for someone else just 2 miles away and they came up dry. That was cause for thanks to the Lord, and a celebration!