Weekly Update: 6.28.26
Of rain, flooding, and power outages
The noise of electricity is something I forget to notice. I am so used to the low hum of appliances and fans that I barely hear them. At night, noise machines and phone apps resonate with artificial nature sounds to mask the unquiet. This is how I typically sleep. When I woke up Friday morning to the sound of a power outage, I was unsettled by how immediately the musical silence of nature filled the house. I could hear birdsong from my own window, as well as from windows across the hall. The morning unfolded to that slow cadence, and I remembered how electricity, for all it’s benefits, severs us from creation. The house warmed in the hours that followed, and I missed the moving air provided by the various fans. Still -- I didn’t miss the noise.
The loss of electricity was the latest effect of the barrage of yet more thunderstorms we had this week. They culminated on Thursday, dumping between 3-5 inches of rain in our area. Our dry creek rushed with water, but we didn’t have nearly the flooding of more low-lying places. As we read reports of water running over Highway 160 in multiple places, we wondered if our dad would make it home from work Thursday night. But by the time he drove home after 8 p.m., the water had receded enough for the roads to be passible.
In the days that followed, the wet weather creek kept running — and the spring was full. The dogs loved it.
Since our house is on an electric well, an unexpected power outage always gets almost immediately annoying, as we don’t have water. Thankfully, we had already planned for a low-productivity Friday. We had a crazy first part of the week, as we worked as hard as we could between rounds of rain to get more of the garden weeded and planted. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we planted more than 100 cucumber plants (both slicing and pickling varieties), along with about 20 melons. We have more melons along with summer and winter squash we will plant next week -- after the first of July. We had planned to wait to put out all of our cucurbits as a method of squash bug prevention, but our cucumbers just grew faster than we expected them to. Along with the cucumbers, we transplanted some tomato seedlings to replace the swath of ours that were eaten by rabbits earlier this year. We also transplanted some dill, parsley, and marjoram starts.
On Wednesday, after a particularly long day of planting, we celebrated the feast of St. John the Baptist with some low-carb grasshopper pie. The dessert may be a bit on the nose, but it sure tasted great on a hot summer day.
We are hopeful that the worst of the summer storms are behind us for awhile. This weekend, we picked up the first round of supplies for our porch cover — cardboard concrete tubes, rebar, and anchor bolts. We plan to get the concrete locally as needed, since we didn’t want to haul all 16 bags out here with the load of lumber. Jeremiah picked up some decking to fix our nieces’ and nephew’s tree house, as the floor needs replaced. We also got lumber to create a more sheltered area in our kennel for puppies this summer. Bonnie-Jean’s German Shepherd Tilde is due to have puppies next month. While we plan to keep the puppies indoors for the first few weeks, they will be spending the majority of their time in the kennel once they are bigger.
On our drive to and from Springfield, I got to soak in the emerald June landscape — more lush and green than we are used to this time of year. All the rain has made life more difficult, but it has also made it more beautiful. When the power was off, most of the family escaped the humid, sticky house, fleeing to the outdoors even though the ground was mushy and we knew it would rain soon. I took a slow walk to the spring, which was deeper than normal. A few of us sat by the Mary garden, which I’ve hardly stopped to enjoy since planting it. In all directions, wild blackberries, gooseberries, and mulberries are ripening. With all the cloudy days this month, I’ve been especially thankful for these sweet moments of silver linings.
