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It rained a little last night. Not much, but enough to reassure me the fires I used to clear out the ground cover above my water pipe from the meter were completely out. I worked on cleaning out the underbrush for the last few days. I got chiggers in every skin crease on my body. The more underbrush I clear out, theoretically, the fewer red bugs there will be on me.
It's a long pipe I'm trying to relocate. My house is at least a hundred yards (91.44 M) from the paved dead-end road that gets me to my driveway. Both me and my youngest brother have county water meters for our domestic water side by side along side the paved road, The 6" County water main was installed on the other side of the road from us.
That meant the county contractor who was hired to install the meters had to bore a tunnel under the paved road in order to install the meters on our side of the road. He did a lousy job. He wasn't paid to think about where he installed the meters. He was paid per meter, and made a living by owning machinery that did the work.
His entrepreneurial rush to install as many meters per day as possible pushed him to put the meters where it was easy for him and not necessarily convenient for us. That shoddy attitude caused us to have to install a much longer pipe to our houses than were needed. I should have been there looking out for our interest. Now I regret my ignorant ways.
The meters were located on the other side of the drainage ditch on the side of the road we live on, but down toward the bottom of the creek that creates the family pond. Instead of locating the meters perpendicular from the paved road, the idiot put the meters where we were force to pipe the water at a long angle uphill to our houses.
A bad situation was made worse by our other brother hauling in some clay-based sand to force the drain water in the ditch to continue on down to where it runs into the family pond. The paved road has a big culvert under it allowing for the flow of the creek, and the roadbed was elevated by fill dirt.
The ditch that runs beside the pave road dropped in elevation when it nears the creek because the roadbed was raised. Water from the ditch was escaping into some already swampy land before it got close to the pond.
The dirt was brought in to force the water to continue along side the road to keep it out of some potential pasture land. Not much. An acre at best. What makes it so ironic is that my brothers who brought in that dirt to create pasture land, sold all the cows, and that acre went fallow.
The problem for me is that dirt he brought in for his reasons put our water meters into the ditch, and they are engulfed by weeds and briars. Mike, the youngish meter reader is scared to crawl through all those briars and tall weeds to read our water meters because of his admitted phobia of snakes. I saw his county truck parked by the meters and went there to talk with him.
That's how I found out his attitude toward reading my water meter and snakes, and it's probably why my water bill doubled on the last billing. Its also my motivation for clearing out the woods along where our water pipes were buried a decade or so ago. A small pine tree wrapped it's roots around my buried pipe and snapped it into, and that leak cost me $1500. That's three months of Social Security checks. I have to find that leak.
This is a situation in which my greatest fears become active, and sometimes rampant. It threatens my need to be alone in order to contemplate my own life. It makes me supremely aware of how close to being thrown out of house and home by the County government I can get if I let myself get too deep in debt.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
