Hard Rain

Raining for hours, whatever chance for fire long extinguished. Coming on seven o'clock in the evening, pearl gray skies, the water has sucked away the heat. It can't be more than 78 degrees outside, because Black Dell is running like a Swiss watch. My phone line is down, which is too bad, because I wanted to talk to my girls, but I did talk with Glenn and Linda and she's going to get back to me on dates for the Emily thing. My only task, I'm pretty sure, was to nail down those dates, so D could design a flyer, and we could, you know, put it on the radnalac, calendar, that time factoring sheet that hangs on the wall. No wind, and every drop of moisture is being sucked back into the system. Everything was so dry. The corn might be ok, the soybeans; what this rain really represents is a whole flush of weeds. Twenty-five years ago, I remember buying a pump, to draw water from a spring to irrigate an acre of corn. There was a slight pitch, in that bottom, that I had enhanced by the way I plowed, so that the water flowed naturally from a higher to a lower point. You can't control water, but you can lead it in your direction. That bottom in Mississippi was about four acres, any given time two acres were fallow, a cover crop of wild peas and clover, and the other two acres were divided between a garden and the corn. I needed the corn, because their were so many mouths to feed. Problem is that corn is not easily digested, but if you cook slops for the pigs and you have a bunch of semi-domesticated chickens, you can convert various starches into fantastic compost. And it's an easy crop to manage. Corn. I have to laugh, it's 3:30 tomorrow already, and I'm remembering a particular corn crop, Jesus, get a life. But I do remember that year, in highly specific detail. The yearly note was due, the only mortgage I ever carried, a single annual payment, and I needed to get twenty hogs finished for auction so that I would have the $5400 I needed. Five years into a ten-year stint, I was able to burn the papers and never look back. Now, I'm completely out of debt, though my vehicle is dying and I have to wrap an Ace Bandage around my hernia; but I don't owe anyone anything.