Chapter 25
L enore completed the evening feeding of her chickens and did a check on the plants in her greenhouse and wagon-hoop beds. Everything hummed along nicely, and Lenore cast a look to Brandon’s cabin.
He’d left that morning to run some errands, pick up a few groceries, shower, and then go visit his friends who’d just had a baby. Paul and Brielle had been home from the hospital for a week or so now, and Brandon had finally arranged to go see them.
Lenore had worked on the homestead by herself that day, without a stitch of the desperation, loneliness, and fear that usually accompanied her chores.
She used her time so much more wisely now, from cutting more lumber, cleaning up debris, and adding food and infrastructure to the homestead.
She still didn’t have water on the homestead, and she couldn’t seem to make a decision about drilling a well or buying a water tank. The truth was, she didn’t have the money for either.
She could admit she’d do almost anything for a hot shower in her own bathroom. She’d taken one at Brandon’s cabin last week, and it had been glorious . Showering at the truck stop just wasn’t the same as having a nice bathroom and staying in the hot stream of water for as long as she wanted.
Zona had sent her home with a few more cases of water, and Lenore had been using it as sparingly as possible while still trying to keep her animals and strawberries alive.
Overhead, the sky grumbled, a sound that actually made Lenore smile. It was predicted to rain tonight, and she couldn’t wait to see how her water catchment system worked. She and Brandon had tested it with a couple of gallons of water, and not a drop had been lost.
But it would be different when a real rainstorm arrived, and Lenore hoped her twenty-gallon container would be enough.
Since they’d only put the catchment system on the south side of the roof, she only had six hundred square feet to collect with.
She’d need to check the sheet Brandon had given her with the calculations, but even in December, a low rainfall month, she remembered it being close to three hundred gallons she could collect.
“For the whole month,” she reminded herself. She dusted off her hands and whistled for the dogs. Together, they went up the back steps, and Lenore washed up with a few tablespoons of water poured over an antibiotic wipe.
She had the means to power a fridge, but she hadn’t made it to town to buy one yet.
Rather, she didn’t have the money, and as she set about pulling a bag of shredded cheese from her cooler, she had the thought that perhaps she should go to the bank.
Maybe she could get a loan for equipment and supplies on the homestead, and if she had a plan for paying it back, surely they’d give her the money.
Right?
“And how will you pay it back?” she murmured to herself.
She lit the flame under a pan and laid down a tortilla, her mind whirring through her ideas yet again. Honey, jam, eggs, lumber.
Out of all of those, eggs and lumber would be the things she could sell immediately. In fact, she’d been selling five dozen eggs per week to people in Three Rivers, and while that only brought in a few dozen dollars, it wasn’t zero.
As her quesadilla toasted, she plugged in her phone and navigated to the online classifieds for Three Rivers, Amarillo, and Pampa. She’d put off listing her lumber for the past couple of weeks, as she hadn’t run the idea past Brandon yet, and she wanted to talk to him.
But he wasn’t there that night, and if Lenore wanted to go to the bank and propose the idea of a loan, she needed income to repay it.
She quickly made a listing, adding the photos of the raw logs she’d prepped in the past, as well as the planed boards stored in her barn.
She’d had to give back the machine Brandon had borrowed from Calvin, but Lenore didn’t worry about that.
She had a huge excess of lumber, though Brandon had now built her mini mobile coops and the garden shed that doubled as a wind blind.
She still wanted pastures with strong fences and solid posts, but there were a lot of trees still to cut for that. She didn’t need more structures. She had a way to grow food, raise livestock, and a solar power system now. She could add animals—like turkeys—as funds allowed.
After a moment’s hesitation, she tapped to post the listing and got the notification that it could take up to an hour for her listing to be approved.
Sighing, she leaned back in her chair as the first sounds of rain hitting the roof filled the cabin. A huge smile came to her face, and Lenore hurried to find the paper with Brandon’s calculations.
Then she smelled something burning. “Shoot.” She jumped over to the stove and flipped off the burner, sliding the pan with her smoking dinner back to a cooler burner. “Well, I won’t be eating that.”
The allure of the rain catchment system drew her again, and she returned to her pile of papers—the sketches Brandon had done for everything here on the homestead.
Her chicken palace. The hooped garden beds.
The greenhouse, with the rain catchment system on the back of it. The water tower. All of it.
“Six hundred square feet,” she muttered as the pinging raindrops continued to hit her tin roof. They’d slide down into the gutter, which Brandon and Colt had covered and tilted slightly to make everything run toward the back corner of the house.
She’d found the twenty-gallon jug here in the house, and she had several ten-gallon containers as well. She may have to go out and change them out as the water accumulated.
She finally found the page and looked at the numbers Brandon had explained to her. “One inch of rain will yield a little over half a gallon per square foot.”
She had six hundred square feet. If it rained an inch tonight, she could collect…three hundred and seventy-five gallons of water.
“It won’t rain that much,” she said out loud.
And it wouldn’t. Brandon’s calculations had her being able to collect two hundred and sixty-five gallons this whole month.
Still, it was far cheaper to fill her ten-gallon tanks this way than driving to the grocery store and refilling them every other day.
Lenore looked over to the half-dozen bottles she’d kept and rotated through. It was far cheaper to buy them and refill them, but it still cost about fifty cents per gallon.
“And this is free.”
Lenore wanted to dance around the room, the happiness inside her multiplying with every moment the rain continued to fall. Then, as the room darkened even further, she moved over and flipped on her lights, beyond grateful that she could do that.
The bulbs blazed to life, and she found her face hurt for how widely she smiled. Her next thought landed on Brandon, and she quickly returned to her charging phone to text him.
Come over to my house tonight. It’s raining and you’ll be in the dark.
Not only that, but the cabin definitely held a chill. Lenore set about making a fire in her pot-bellied stove, and she had to go outside to get more firewood. She stood there, protected by the roof and eaves, marveling at how good God had been to her these past few weeks.
“He’s always been good to you,” she murmured, because she had to believe that He didn’t only care about her during times of ease. He’d always been there; she just hadn’t been able to push past the negative things in her life to see Him, feel Him, know Him.
She collected the wood she needed and took it back into the house. Then she grabbed her phone and tapped on the flashlight as she went back down the hall and onto the porch. She walked right over to the corner where the railing met the house and shined her light toward the corner of the greenhouse.
The twenty-gallon tank had been attached there, with a tube going from the rain gutter into it. It sure seemed to be filling, and in fact, Lenore whooped when she saw it already held about one-quarter of its capacity.
“Five gallons,” she said, a joyous laugh following her words.
The wind kicked up, and Lenore rushed back inside to build her fire.
She hadn’t heard from Brandon yet, and she hoped he’d be able to make it back to the homestead safely in this storm.
Sometimes they got snow and tornadoes in the Panhandle, but Lenore had looked up the weather, and this was supposed to just dump rain.
She’d take it.
With the fire crackling merrily, Lenore readied her ten-gallon tanks. She didn’t have another fitting for the top, but she could unscrew the one on the twenty-gallon tank and affix it to a new container.
If only she knew how long to wait. She didn’t, so she went back outside to check the tank again. The water level didn’t seem to have moved at all, and she either needed a bigger tank or some sort of alarm that would tell her when the one she had was reaching its capacity.
She set an alarm for twenty minutes on her phone, determined not to be crazy about checking the container. When the alarm went off, she went outside.
“Oh, wow,” she said, because the twenty-gallon container was very nearly full. She darted back inside, grabbed three of the ten-gallon bottles and boogied back outside. The moment she stepped off the back porch, she knew she should’ve put on a raincoat.
As it was, she got soaked in a matter of seconds, and she grumbled as she ducked past the wood pile to the greenhouse. She had to get up on a step-ladder to reach the container, and in the darkness, with the rain pelting down, Lenore cursed into the sky.
“I need a better way to change this,” she yelled to the lightning. The thunder boomed back, and Lenore managed to get the lid off the twenty-gallon container and fitted onto the ten-gallon one. She balanced that on the top step of the ladder and reached for the full container.
And totally forgot the twenty gallons of water weighed a lot .
Like, a-lot-a-lot.
She bobbled it, desperate to hold onto it. Some sloshed over the edge, and Lenore cried out as she felt herself tipping sideways off the ladder. It was only a couple of steps up, and yet she felt like she’d be falling down the Grand Canyon if she lost her balance.
By wrapping both arms around the bottle, she managed to keep it from tipping too badly, and she stumbled down the steps and under the two-foot overhang of the roof. Her hands shook, but she managed to get the bottle on solid ground.
The ten-gallon container had started to fill nicely, and Lenore ran back into the rain, then the house, and collected all the bottles. She’d stand out here all night if it meant she could have eighty gallons of water at the end of it.
Eighty. Gallons.
She glanced at the five-thousand-gallon tank, dismay pulling sharply through her.
She shouldn’t have rejected Colt’s idea of fixing the leak, but she hadn’t wanted to deal with something unclean, where she’d have to treat everything with chemicals, any of it.
The idea of doing that had felt too big, too unwieldy, and she’d told him not to come last week.
And he hadn’t. She still had the tank, so she could text him and see if he could fix it before the next storm. She reminded herself that the big rainfall months weren’t until summertime, and she didn’t need five thousand gallons right now.
Heck, eighty felt like a miracle.
By the time the rain started to lessen and then dry up, Lenore had filled four of her six ten-gallon bottles. With the fifth attached and not even close to being full, she finally went back into the house.
All she wanted was a long, hot shower—and she had no way to get it. She huddled in front of the stove, her fingers tingling as the warmth hit them. A violent shiver wracked her body, and her stomach growled.
Then, as if God Himself had arrived in her cabin, an unexplained warmth flowed over Lenore, like someone had put a blanket directly from the dryer over her shoulders.
Her head swam, and she pressed her eyes closed. If she could just?—