07.16.08
Heat waves and rewrites.
On my way home from work today, I stopped at the produce stand and picked up just under two pounds of roma tomatoes, two cucumbers for a dollar, two red onions, and a very large green bell pepper. After I arrived home and parked the car in the garage, I noticed how dry the ground was in the section of the back yard between the house and the garage. I put the groceries away and rather than drain the pond into the yard behind the garage like I had planned to do, I hooked up the sprinkler to a garden hose that I have attached to a spigot bypass in the outflow pipe from the pond pump. This allows a portion of the water to bypass the filter, and I use it to water plants and in times of little or no rain, the lawn. The pressure in this line is rather low, I’d say below 20 psi, so the range the sprinkler covers in less than half that of the garden hose. The advantage to this is the pond water is already fertilized. The disadvantage is about once an hour, I have to clean tiny pieces of algae from the sprinkler that plug up the flow. Since this water bypasses the filter, the particles aren’t trapped by it.
After about three hours, I had drained about 500 gallons. Each section of lawn was watered for about thirty minutes. As I moved the sprinkler from area to area, I could almost hear the grass sigh in relief. Fifty minutes later, the pond was refilled. When most of my neighbors can skip a week or two of grass cutting during times of little rain, I’m still cutting grass somewhere in the yard, thanks to the supplemental irrigation. I also use the pond water to irrigate the herb and vegetable garden. You should see the size of our zucchini, that is when we plant it.
You may remember my post from July 8, when I mentioned the dragonflies out at the pond. I had mentioned that I thought there might be a poem in that scene I had described. Well “The dance of dragonflies” was finished on the Tuesday the 15th. Sorry I forgot to mention it then. It’s a rhyming poem with fourteen beat lines. As I was drifting off to sleep the night before, the first few lines came to me. I got out of bed immediately, came downstairs and wrote them down, or in my case typed them into a word document. Then midmorning on the 15th, I sat down in front of the computer and finished writing the poem. At one point I closed the document without saving the changes I had recently made. This was when Mom called about the price of oil. When I returned to the computer, I opened the document and I was missing an entire strophe and several rewritten lines. Boy was I pissed. Luckily, I was able to remember most of it, but I’m certain some of the poem was lost. It turns out to have been a good thing because the poem wound up being five strophes rather than three. Having to recreate the text gave me more time to think about the poem and I was able to flesh it out a little bit. Rewrites can be a good thing.
O.P.W.
