I think of Mike at the strangest times. Over the weekend I was going through some receipts and I came across some of his from the pharmacy. Strangely enough, this made me nostalgic.

Sassy checking out the new water setup.

I seem to be going about my life in a normal progression and then I see, hear, or something happens that makes me think of Mike.

This summer the automatic waterers at my horse barn have seemed a little off. The one in the pasture with the four mares didn’t seem to give them enough water on hot days so I had taken to keeping a tank with water in it in their pasture. I had to fill it about every three days.

I thought I had noticed a couple of weeks ago that the water seemed to be running slower than it had before. Then the woman who has been feeding my horses while I’m in Kansas City having radiation said that she thought it was running slower too.

I called Charlie and checked another hydrant. It didn’t seem like there was too much wrong. On Sunday before I left Charlie checked the electricity on the well and said that it wasn’t electrical. We needed to call someone because he thought it was something in the pump.

I went on to Kansas City and forgot about it. Friday afternoon the woman who was feeding texted me and said there was no longer water flowing from the hydrant in the barn. She said the waterers had water in them though.

I called someone to get the number of the person who works on water wells and called him. He was west of Oakley and would stop by on his way back to Grinnell.

When he called me he didn’t have good news, the well was dry. He went on to say that wells as old as this one had only been dug down 20-30 feet and the water table had dropped since then. So, my options were to have a new well dug or repair the water lines from the city meter and put them back on city water.

He estimated that to dig a new well would be significantly more expensive than repairing the water lines so that sounds like the way we’ll go.

My point is that most of this would have been taken care of by Mike. This is probably a huge trigger to my nostalgia this weekend. That and the fact that I’m having to find people to stay with me, so I can stay in the American Cancer Society’s Hope Lodge in Kansas City while I have treatments. Even though I was Mike’s caregiver they would have accepted him as my caregiver during my stay there.

This is all part of the new normal that I will be facing from here forward.

There’s Nobody But Me to count on to help me out.

Onward! Celebration

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