Happiness is a Warm Gun

I'll call it guano. Birds at my feeders left several spots on my porch screens, and just as you don't leave guano on a vehicle or your hat you don't leave it on aluminum screening either, for more than a season. The screens are beneath the eaves and rarely washed by rain.

Removing each screen and spray washing each with the hose was too much work. Spray washing the screens while they were in place, from the outside, would force guano inward onto the porch when that was the opposite of the goal. The screen frames are also old and fragile and the screening very delicately sandwiched between their pieces -- can't power-wash. And when the porch walls get wet the paint peels.

Rooting through the garage found me the answer: the old plastic-embedded-with-glitter "Splash" squirtgun, one of two. The pink squirtgun I'd favored got clogged with hard-water residue. This one still worked, and I'd kept it for 10 years thinking someday I might need it, and smack my butt and call me Sally, after filling the squirtgun with warm water I stood inside the porch and with skillful aim squirted water outward through my screens and I was pleased as punch that probably no one else in the county did the exact same thing today.

What It's Like to Have a Pumphouse

Nobody told me anything about this small odd-shaped wooden structure with a midget door except that in deep lengthy cold I'd better put a heater in it. Nobody said what was inside, or what kind of heater. Soon I learned this structure just outside my kitchen door was a pumphouse. I never opened the small door to see the actual pump because bees by the dozens crawled in and out of cracks in the wood as if the pumphouse were a beehive. Eventually ivy grew and twined it shut.

Bit by bit it taught me. It's an electric pump, so outages mean no water. Therefore I keep a few gallons of bottled water, and when storms threaten, I fill pans. Calcium-rich well water will encrust every faucet and etch every glass, and the dishwasher erodes dishes until one day they crack, just like your skin, and it gives all your clothes, not just jeans, a lovely stonewash; and the fix is to add vinegar or clean with vinegar, and buy new glassware when too embarrassed to explain to guests that the glasses are not dirty, just cloudy; and that if you keep drinking from cloudy glassware it'll abrade and split the corners of your lips; and soon I learned I had to filter the drinking water or else be just as stonewashed on my inside. (To install a water softener is too expensive, and the salt would affect the creek.) Wash the car with this water and it'll dull the surface and leave dry white calcium hickeys.

The water tastes fine and fresh to me, but people do remark that it's different from city tap water. Only once did the pump freeze up, the first winter here, '98-'99, for a short time only; good thing because I had no heater for the pumphouse and no place to plug one in. And while hosing down the garden during long droughts it'd pump for ten minutes, dribble, and then quit, such was the local demand on the water table. It taught me (and sometimes I still remember) that I live on a planet. Water direct from the outdoor spigot is so cold it's painful. When people worry about the world's water supply I don't worry.

That said, the pump has never failed, but the pumphouse roof was rotted, so the handyman came and opened its door and tore off the roof to replace it, and for the first time I saw that the pump is a simple gray cylinder about the size of a propane barbecue cylinder. Why such a sizeable pumphouse then? For insulation. Behold a real "pump house" that is not a bar or restaurant.

There'll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town

Taken in Bourbon, MO. There's another one, too, in case this one runs out.

Got Water?

Sunday I get up and the water heater's leaking. Oh mercy. Mopped it up. Had to shut off the valve to the house and phone the handyman on his day off. He'll be here tomorrow morning. To get water today I make do, stepping outside to the pump house with some saucepans and buckets. I consider this a great privilege, not the holy terror it is when the plumbing's not working in the city.

Too bad I couldn't wash clothes or dishes or floors today. Instead, I relaxed and saw a rose-breasted grosbeak I will try to photograph for you.

The Rain Barrel Solution

Well water is so darn hard it grays my skin and hair. Recent rains also made the water stinky. I thought, get a softener, a purifier. After spending the evening with Culligan et al., turns out that water gets softened by pumping it through salt, or, the "salt-free" alternative, potassium.

Laundry and dishwater here drain off the limestone cliff twenty foot down into The Secret Pond, right now chock-full of Spring Peepers, and I'll be dad-blamed if I'll salt and shrivel them and everything around them. Besides, there's no room for two tanks and 40-lb. bags of salt, and needless to say there ain't several thousand dollars.

I could get a counter-top water distiller if I had a countertop and lots of wattage to keep the thing steaming -- and if I wanted an all-year, 24-hour Turkish bathhouse in place of a kitchen.

Bottled water is a choice, but not for showers or laundry. Reverse osmosis is slow, and 4 or 5 gallons of water are wasted for every osmosis gallon you get.

Then I remembered my granddad in Park Falls, WI, in the early 1960s, had a rain barrel. I lined two 5-gallon paint buckets with trash bags and now after it's rained I have soft water, the old-fashioned way, to sponge off with or to stick my head into post-shampoo. Yeah, it's cold. But it's natural, cheap, and I aint no sissy.