My 94 year old Aunt Genevieve used to ask me about raising goats and chickens. She would laugh at the stories, commanding me even to the last week of her life, to write the stories down and share that intriguing part of our life. That was the get-serious motivation to write, A Homestead Decade – How Crunchy Granola Changed My Life. I say get-serious because it was always one of those someday things we carry around in our to-do lists.
I was also motivated by the new world of the e-book and the ease of facilitating an outlet for such a book. Crunchy Granola, our shortcut to talk about the memoir, is now available on Amazon Kindle Books for a meager $2.99. We are grateful for the wonderful comments received about the book, yet we are also haunted by so much that was left out in our excited haste to get the thing done.
Therefore, in this new fantastic world of e! , we can continue the story and comments about “back-to-the-land” movements, then and now, through a web log. Join us as we see just where the blog takes us. It should be another intriguing journey of its own.
One such story is associated with getting water in and out of the house. I don’t find this topic discussed very often except in trade journals for plumbers and backhoe services. Not that these trade journals are easily accessible to me.
While we were building our homestead house, we planned for a 4” well to obtain water. Only one well-driller in the county had the equipment for such a wide pipe. We were told he was also a dowser, he could find water anywhere using the ancient dowser trick of grasping the forked ends of a branch in his hands and “feeling” the vibration of water from the point of the branch as the point dipped downward pointing to the source of water. Uh-huh.
So we hired Mr. B to come find a good water source and drill a fine well for us. Well, Mr. B came on a Sunday evening after dinner dressed in his Sunday duds, a woman sat in the truck waiting for him. He sliced a forked branch of a young wild cherry grumbling a bit to himself about no willows on the property. Dowsing rod in position he began walking slowly over the land surrounding the house. We followed trying to see the point of the stick around his large body. In a moment of anticipating some country magic we heard a grand almost musical fart burst through Mr. B’s aura. Joel glanced at me wide eyed before he began to laugh out loud. Mr. B was not fazed. He continued walking over the building site up the western slope through briars and mud at the edge of the trees finally declaring “There it is.”
What? No shimmy on the stick, not even a downward point? And look at the spot, Joel protested, the unprepared west side of the house, up a hill, in the woods! There was no way we could get a big well drilling rig up there. By some dowsing mystery, Mr. B rather quickly “found” water on the flatter south side of the property, where he eventually dug our well 80’down. Now that was a powerful dowsing rod.
So goes the stories of our country living. I am hoping to have some fun with this blog sharing stories and recipes and comments on the desire to live in the country. If you would like to take a look at the book, A Homestead Decade – How Crunchy Granola Changed My Life, you can read a sample chapter free on www.Amazon.com Kindle Books. Or better yet, just order a copy for your Kindle or PC or smartphone. Cheap. And it’s a fast and funny read. Let me know what you think.
Helene
No comments:
Post a Comment