This is a telling of how storms can create, not only havoc, but strange happenings. If you recall, a dear friend brought a very unique garden sign to the Bayou. I have known this lady since I was a mere tyke so the sign was much appreciated and much loved. It was immediately hung at the entrance of the gardens where it could be fully enjoyed. Since the sign was created from a huge piece of driftwood, it only seemed fitting to use oarlocks as the hanging brackets. Two oarlocks were inserted into pipes and used as handy sign posts. It worked like a charm and made for an easy removal of the sign for the storm event we just endured.
This morning, after a very rough night of wind and torrential rains, Son and I went to observe and take inventory of what needed repairing. One of the first things he noted was that a huge oak limb had fallen and hit the roof of the house. Then, he spied that one of my oarlocks had been yanked from the metal pipe. The oarlock was nowhere to be seen. Son decided that the tree limb must have bounced off the house and hit the pipe sending the oarlock into flight. We searched and searched but to no avail. Of course, debris was everywhere and could have been covering the 9 inch oarlock.
Finally, a triumphant "Aha!" sounded and Son held up the wayward oarlock. It had been flung over 25 feet from its station in the pipe! Imagine the force taken to sling a heavy, iron oarlock some twenty feet....INTO a 50 mph wind! It sure made me glad that I was inside when this strange event happened! First, the falling limb, itself, presented danger but, if I had been hit by the 1 lb iron oarlock being flung with that much force, my head may have been knocked asunder!
After storms of this sort, one finds all sorts of odd things. Some are trash. Some are treasures. Some simply are purely strange. Tomorrow begins cleanup and pier rebuilding. We will have a busy two weeks of hard work.
Today was not good. It was not particularly bad but it was just not good. It started off at the break of day. I got out of bed full of vim and vigor. I was ready to tackle the world but that came a screeching halt. I turned on the faucet to fill the coffee pot and nothing happened. No water came gushing from that spigot! Nothing...not even a dribble. Uh, oh. This is never a good thing especially when you have a well. Anything from busted pipes, well gone dry or burned up pump could be a reality and that reality was not on my agenda for the day. I called Son.
"Hop to it, Michael! We don't have any water and without water there shall be no coffee!" I yelled up the stairs. Never uttering a word, he came stumbling down the stairs. "No water?" he queried. "Nope...no water." He headed out the door to the pump shed. "Wow." was all I heard. I peeked into the shed. Wow, indeed. Water was everywhere as was everything else that had been stored in the shed! It looked like a mini-hurricane had attacked our pump shed! Geez! This was not good. Some very large critter had decided to rearrange everything. After turning off the electricity to the pump, we decided it would be prudent to clear out the jumbled up clutter before he tackled the pump, itself. Once we pulled out the thousand or so tools, old furniture and other odds and ends, he discovered that whatever critter was in the shed all night, had broken the pipe that led to the house. Obviously, the pump had been running for quite some time. Stuff was not only knocked around, it was soaked! I cleaned while he did plumbing work.That, my friends, was when I discovered where some fantastic treasures have been hiding for the past decades!
One of my favorite "treasures" of the day is an old paint sprayer. Yeah, I realize that this is probably more trash than treasure but it means something to me. This was Pop's old sprayer. I very rarely remember him using it since he always painted everything with a brush but, still, it was his and that is important! I set the paint sprayer aside to be cleaned and moved inside the house. It is a good thing that the Little Bayou House is more like a museum of oddities than a prim and proper house! Things like this fill shelves and all of the nooks and crannies of the house. To me, they are treasures. To everyone else, they are junk...dust-collecting, space-consuming junk. TREASURES!! TREASURES!!
