Farm Speak/ City Speak

Uncle Terry spends a lot of time apparently doing nothing.  When there was no water pressure, he leaned on the doorframe of the well house, chewing on a toothpick, for a very long time.  He told me later he was listening to the pump cycle and making various other observations to rule out the possible problems one by one.  His final conclusion was that he had to ‘pull the well’ to see if there was a hole in the tubing.  I understood those three words but had no idea what they meant.  The well is a hole in the ground with a spigot at the top and pump at the bottom with 200 feet of rubber bicycle tubing and wires in between.  The pump looks like a large coffee thermos.  You hook that spigot up the pickup with chain and pull the whole assembly out.

      I never thought that much about running water until I went to Haiti. My friend that I went with bought a pump for the family that she stays with.  Her bottom line for comfort was that there had to be running water.  The cistern ran out the day before we left while she was in the shower.  The pump would not come on to refill the cistern until the electricity came back on from 3-7 in the morning.  I guess the family knew how she felt about it because one of the girls ran to the roof to get her a bucket of shower water while the dad, Mario, ran to the corner to get fuel for the generator.

     When I first lived in Spain, water rationing meant that the water was turned off during the day.  Hotels had cisterns, but I didn’t. I was young and single, and  I swam and showered at the base, so I didn’t really care.  You get used to it and deal with it.

Terry has these giant tractor tires all over his property.  I supposed it was there to protect the water spigot by the post.

No.  He fills the tire with water and that is how he waters the cattle. Everyone else uses the fragile, rusty metal troughs.  More about that tomorrow.  He is not running cattle (more farm-speak) because the price of calves is really high right now.  He buys the calves from dairy cows, raises them on his pastureland and then sells them at two years.  He is a born farmer and loves his cattle and is really missing them.  Making sure they have water is a daily preoccupation when he has them.

   I told him I was going to post the pictures on pinterest and he would be famous…or at least would get lots of likes.  That was all city-speak to him, but he’s curious about everything and so I got to explain it to him.