Ted’s Turn

General William T. Sherman once said if he owned Texas and Hell, he’d rent Texas and live in Hell. No doubt, General Sherman had been in Texas during the summer. This summer has been brutal with the many days of 100 o+ temperatures and the weeks of not even a drop of rain. What grass that is left crunches and breaks under foot. Trees are dropping their leaves. Birds sit in the defoliating branches with their beaks open as they pant. The local lakes are dropping by a foot a day. Ranchers are hoping that their tanks won’t dry up. El Paso has been flooded, east Texas has been normal, but central Texas is about to blow away. My hayfield only produced one third the hay as it usually does. It is too blasted hot to do much of anything for long outside. The horse is now joined by the llamas at the feed gate during the heat of the day. There is shade there, but they aren’t waiting for feed-they want to be hosed down and cooled off.

That includes getting around to fixing a small leak I have somewhere from the pump house to the ranch house. I looked at it the other day. There is a small pool the size of a bucket and wet mud around the site. It is located next to a slab of concrete that once held an old wind driven pump. Now the slab damns up the water from the leak. Getting to fix it means having to contend with the thorns and branches that hover over it. It just hasn’t been a high priority item to fix.

That small pool has turned into an oasis. I see various species of birds loitering around and dropping in for a drink and a quick rinse. Toads wander over in the evenings as do frogs. Squirrels risk time on the ground for water. I’ve seen deer tracks around as well as raccoons. At night, I hear stirrings in the dry leaves as some creature heads for the pool. It has become so busy, I will probably have to file an environmental impact statement when I fix the leak. I won’t fix it yet though, it seems to be too important for so much life.

Our life can get as dry and barren as Texas in August. Hope of relief is nowhere in sight, and an occasional flash of lightening beyond the horizon in the night sky happens just to taunt us. At a well in another parched part of the world Jesus told a woman that from Him would come living water. May that be the water we all seek- in abundance and not just as a leak.