My Mom Knew
In times past after my Dad had passed away, I would travel to my parent’s farm and spend time with my Mom helping her with some things. Not that my Mom could not have gotten them done on her own, but it gave us a chance to spend time together. Martin, Mom’s neighbor, happened to stop in for coffee on one such a visit of mine. I had known Martin almost my entire life. While Mom was describing something I had done for her, she told Martin I had a lot of tenacity. I had not ever heard my Mom use that word let alone that she knew what it meant.
That was several decades ago and I am here to tell you, I still have it. I had, and still do have, tenacity. It didn’t matter if was stacking bales on the hay rack in an alfalfa field in the heat of the day or at a time when the kid’s father, Orlin, and I were making a home out of a chicken cope in Texas. Get it done.
This last week I did think I was wavering. Our lawn mowing and trimming went great and Stauffer Avenue never looked finer. That night a strong thunder storm brought a lot of rain in a short amount of time. The next morning by the time I got up Dennis had already been moving things out of the porch. Yup. It, right along with the patio, had flooded and there was work waiting for us. One thing led to another and we tackled getting the mud off of the patio that surround the porch. The ground was so saturated there was no way more water from the garden hose could be used to flush it off. As the Koi pond was overflowing, I used an empty ice cream pail of pond water to take a small area at a time, and low and behold eventually the brushed aggregate was looking good. That is how the two and a half inches treated us on Tuesday.
Friday the warnings came that more storms and rain were headed our way. When all was said and done it was four and sixth tenths of rain. At Friday night, midnight, I had to put shoes on, and with my trusty CSI flashlight I walked out to the edge of our garage and shone the light off of all the water that was on the patio and right east of our house. In the morning we could see that our entire backyard was a lake. Water, water, water.
Saturday morning the patio was again tackled for a cleanup. There was no way I could stand by and not begin a cleanup. The silt was a slimy mess. Dennis had been watching the north side of our home where the sump pump takes the water from the tile around the house. The sump pump was running every 35 seconds on Saturday. With all the rain of the week, the soil could not take it away as fast as it was collecting. We were having a huge amount of standing water right up to the north side of the house. So not a good thing from what our objective is. Dennis put our portable sump pump into the midst of it and has been running the water via the garden hose out into the curb and gutter. Yesterday and today he has been on standby to periodically plug in the portable pump to take away much of the water from north of the house. Here we are today and the house pump is still running every 75 seconds.
With Dennis working with sump pumps, today was my day to tackle the two closets we have in our basement. These closets were not included in the tile job. These closets were actually a part of the old cistern that was in the basement. The floors of these closets are like a shallow dish. If there is enough seepage through the foundation they will run over and drain into the tile that goes around the perimeter of the basement, with the remaining standing water. Today Dennis helped me get the wet vacuum into the basement so I could begin work on drying out these floors. Of course, we had carpets on the floors and we consider them excellent storage spaces. I must say that over the years we have gotten a bit wiser. During this latest mess, we had one cardboard box get wet. Cardboard and basements are not a good mix no matter what.
Here we are on Father’s Day evening, so very thankful that though we are weary beyond belief from this last week, we are safe and our home is secure. Tenacity, where would Dennis and I be without it? Mom, I am here to tell you, we don’t give in and we don’t give up.