I sincerely hope that we at least get/got a little rain this week. At this writing on Monday all was dry, very, very dry.
Following the flash flood of late August, our little ole Pine Grove Road, which was washed out pretty good, got all spruced up with new, deeper ditches and a smooth dirt and gravel bed — as smooth as dirt and gravel can be anyway. Since then, not a drop of rain has fallen and we don’t even know if those new ditches will hold water or not.
They are dry, and they are dusty.
To add insult to injury, throw in the chicken trucks running in and out Sunday night into Monday and the freshly cleaned off front porch, as of Sunday afternoon, is now completely engulfed again in a dusty, dry, red dirt haze.
An empty truck, heading in to fill up with birds, blew by just as I walked out the front door en route to the office Monday morning and suddenly I too was engulfed in a dust bowl type dust storm and me and my truck were wearing that red dirt haze as well. I felt like I was at the Neshoba County Fair in the middle of summer.
The grass is dead from the frost on top of the drought and it crunches beneath my feet and puffs of dust come puffing up of off anything and everything touched. I find it a bit odd that we had several days of freeze and frost and now it is as hot and as dry as summer all over again.
Wife Danny and I also cleaned the front flower beds of their frost-burned elephant ears, coleus, and hydrangea — and a good bit of the devil itself in the form of Wisteria vine and saw briar — and got a dusty dusting on our outsides and a pretty good snort of the same on the inside Sunday afternoon before we were finished.
We did get to relax with a cool drink for a moment on the fairly clean porch to rinse the dust down before moseying on inside at dinner time.
As fate would have it, because of Snot the yard dog, that is not our yard dog, we now have a gate on our porch blocking the steps. We had to find a way to keep Snot, and her snot, off the porch. Hope the gate works.
Anybody need a friendly, female Blue Heeler with a runny nose?
In my little fall garden, the mustard and collard greens are struggling to keep their heads up even with a daily watering and some pesky varmint helped itself to the parsley over the weekend devouring every last shred of it right down to the dirt. Monday morning there was one little sprig trying to reemerge. It is in a clay pot, and I suppose that pot may have to make its way to the gated porch as well.
By the way, it ate my cabbage too.
Gated porch?! What in the world has become of good ole fashioned country life?
Pine Grove has always been a dirt road and I’ve been living there on and off, mostly on now, for all of my 61 years. I really don’t ever remember it being this dusty even when the ditches were deep, the banks very tall, and before it was rerouted from just a few feet away from our front steps.
We did a lot of ditch playing, and pasture running, and Maypop popping back then and I swear I do not ever remember a cloud of dust like that chicken truck stirred up Monday morning.
As an aside, I recently found out — at this later stage in life — that the insides of Maypops are edible and supposedly quite tasty too. Unfortunately now that I know that, the banks are gone, and the ditches not so deep, and few if any ‘pops are found to be popped around our place anymore.
So, back to the topic at hand.
The weather people said on Monday that there was a good chance of rain on Tuesday, but this paper had to go to press before we had a chance to see if that came to fruition or not.
I certainly hope it did. If not I’m pretty sure I was back in the little garden with the watering can and snorting some more dust whilst trying to keep it off the porch, and out of the house, and I’m pretty sure that I was not having much luck at either.
The dog, on the other hand, is not on the porch and although it looks silly with a gate across the steps, it is, indeed, serving its purpose! So far!
