Saturday morning we already knew we had another heat wave to live through for a few days, but we're used to it. The sun was shining, but I kept hearing distant thunder. Around 8 o'clock or so, there came a crack of lightning that was obviously very close; Gabe jumped down from the couch and looked from me to Cliff, as though he thought we could control such things. It was just that one sizzling, ear-bursting strike of lightning, then nothing but distant thunder again. We got about four-tenths of an inch of rain, par for the course these days.
We also got a day with no running water. That lightning had struck a big tree and ruined the pump at the bottom of a very deep well (more that a hundred feet), leaving Woodhaven Acres with two homes that had no way to bathe, wash dishes, or flush the commode. The pump had to be pulled out, and then the grandson went to Feldman's in Blue Springs to buy a new pump for the well. He is blessed to have that one friend he can count on to help him in the worst situations, things like pulling pumps, finding runaway cows that jump the fence, or digging septic tanks; and the two of them spent the day trying to get that pump to work, with Cliff doing the best he could to help them in spite of his age.
The pump was a little different than what we have had in the past, and some time after noon, the boys gave up and Arick went and traded it for one that had the same kind of wiring as our old one: They had to pull the pump again, but this time they had success, although it was getting dark when they finished. I'm sure if you did a search of my blog for the word "pump", you would see other times we've had to buy pumps. We've lived here fifty years, and messing around with all that mess is one of our worst nightmares. At one time the original well started giving us sand with our water, and the only thing you can do for that is to have another well driven. Expensive indeed!
Cliff thinks the tree that was hit will likely die. It really doesn't look that bad to me, but there's a place near the ground where the bark is gone and the dirt around the tree shows that the big tree actually moved in the ground. A squirrel gave his life simply by being in the wrong tree. I hope it's one of the squirrels that picked all my pears off the tree when they were still green!
So, life goes on, and we'll survive.
