November 27: Crawlspace Waterbed

In the morning, the rain had stopped. The water in the utility closet had slowed to a very slow drip. Everything seems better in the morning.

Lately we’ve read and talked through some of Proverbs. Solomon uses words that may need explanation ("Froward" means "perverse," for example), and so we talk through maybe half a chapter, verse by verse. The startling bit today was that Wisdom calls in the street, but if you refuse to listen, she says that she will laugh at the day of calamity. That’s such an “I told you so!” response as to be shocking, unchristian. And yet … she offered to make fools wise, and they refused. So is that shocking? Or just a natural, right response, unkind though it may seem?

After he played some card games with the boys, Phil worked on storage cabinets for most of the rest of the day: doors, shelves, handles. The temperature is supposed to plummet tonight (“feels like 10” the forecast promised). I gathered together my kitchen goods from the white barn and RV; I cleaned various appliances and foodstuffs. Rather than five gallon buckets of popcorn and spelt and oats in the barn, I now have half gallon glass canning jars filled and on my shelves. If I want to mill some spelt, I open the jar and pour it in. So easy! So clean! I don't have to wipe snails off the spelt buckets (that is, until I need to refill the glass jars). And they look so nice, too.

Caleb probably didn’t need to eat more than usual, but I have a lot of kitchen goods and it felt like I was interrupted regularly. By end of day, I had not nearly finished putting the food and equipment where it should all be.

At one point, though, Phil headed down to work in the crawl space. And the rain yesterday had pooled at the corner of the house, where the grading is not quite finished because Phil had so much to do, he moved on to something else, something urgent at that moment. Phil said that he was walking on the plastic and about midway across the crawlspace, it suddenly felt like a waterbed.

Phil is so, so close to being done in the crawlspace, but will he get to work down there even yet this week? Hard to say.

As long as the end was not in sight, I could deal with most setbacks with equanimity. But the idea of even a few days’ delay brought me, yet again, to tears.

On further reflection, though, I can manage a few days’ delay. I can manage even for weeks. We will survive. We always have.