Friday, September 2, 9:30 PM. Brewer.

I’ve about got the water system over at the farm complete. It’s not so different from the one I set up at our house, just bigger.

I feel like I spend half my life driving around Dallas searching for things. In the apocalypse, driving around is the new Google. It’s amazing the things people have hidden away in warehouses and back lots. Our water system is built out of things I found that way.

The farm house is two stories. The showers and faucets on the upper floor are a good twenty feet off the ground. That means I need a water tower higher up than that. At first this really flummoxed me. Even if I could build a tower high and strong enough, I wasn’t sure I could drive and operate a crane to hoist a big tank on top.

Then I realized there was another way to skin the cat. The farm sits in a little valley. There are trees all around. It’s quite beautiful. To the east the field rises in a long slope, about a quarter-mile, that climbs more sharply at the top to form a hill, sort of a ridge. I used my phone to get the angle from the house to the ridge and calculated the height. It’s about 70 feet above the top floor of the house. It doesn’t look like it’s that high but it is. It would mean laying a lot of pipe but would give pretty good pressure even to the upstairs bathrooms. To the left the ridge drops down sharply to the creek. I could put my intake pipe there where the water is deepest, run it through a purifier, and pump it up to the ridge.

I set up a platform on top of the ridge. I put a 1,500 gallon tank on top of that. I’ve got the purifier and pump delivering clean water to the tank. Now I just need to dig a trench back to the house and lay pipe.

It’s going to work.

The kids have been getting the house and pool ready. It looks nice. I want to make it pretty for Amy. It’s going to be hard for her to leave the house where we made so many memories. The farm is bigger and fancier. We never would’ve been able to afford something like this on teachers’ salaries. But it’s not home. And she’s missing home, missing all the people, even more than the rest of us are.

Sometimes I think she misses him. But I can tell she’s fighting that. I can tell she’s trying to make it work. She asked for forgiveness and I’ve forgiven her. I can’t worry about it.