Women Over Fifty

For me, exercise is about feeling good.  I have almost no pain from my knee, which was on the verge of crippling me, and my body just seems to pay me back for the effort.  When I come home tired and ready to flop, along comes a surge of energy and I never quite make it to my cozy chair.

Today we have something in Southern California we don’t often see. RAIN!  Cold, wet, wind-blown rain.  That’s not a big deal to you who have regular rain, but we’ve been in a drought.  I hate to see all that water go down the drains.  I want it to stay in huge puddles that seep into the ground.

So, being a dry-lander, that is, someone who usually is in a dry climate, I had to go out and walk in the rain.  We have family in Seattle, and so I dug out my Seattle clothing: a long black, lined raincoat and hat, my pink paisley umbrella, and my black rain boots with the white spots on them.  Ready!  Off I went tromping in the rain trying to get pictures.

On our little stub of a street we have what is known as an Arizona crossing. 

Arizona doesn’t get a lot of rain either.  What we have is a low bridge with a drain pipe running through.  When we have a big rain, like today, the bridge is designed to allow the rain water to flow over the top.  This bridge is also our access to the rest of our world.Today the rain is flowing over the bridge at a pretty good clip.   I drove our heavy-duty pickup through it earlier on my way to exercise at Curves.   This time I went back to get pictures.  It’s not too bad yet.  There’s a little waterfall that goes over the end of the bridge.  It’s still there.  When the water backs up, the waterfall disappears and you can’t tell where the bridge is.  That’s when things get touchy.  It’s also the drop dead time to NOT take your passenger car over the bridge.  Most of the time we just stay home and build a fire in the fireplace.

Another hazard of being a drylander is that the power lines don’t get washed off for months at a stretch.  Some of the cities actually have a truck that makes its rounds washing off the contacts.  We live in the county and there are no line washing trucks our way.  We have to wait for a rain.  Today, while the lines and their contacts are getting a good wash, we are preparing for things to happen.  For us, power outages occur two ways, when water gets into wires that have cracked with the sun, and when someone skids out and takes out a power pole.  Both things happen when we get our first big rain after the dry season.

Today when I was having a walk in the rain, I also visited the drainage alongside of our house.  They just finished building a new school next to our property.  The play fields are next to our house and quite a bit higher than our property.  There has always been a drainage between our house and that property.  However, in planning sessions for the school, every time I mentioned the need to preserve that drainage in good shape you could tell they were not believing me.  You see, this little drain takes the water from the surrounding area and dumps it into the creek at the far end of the school property.  If something gets in its way and there’s a lot of rain, it also dumps water into my house.  (Picture disbelief from the builders of the school.)  I put up a steady stream of warnings while they pushed the earth here and there and built the school.  Today, I went to see how it was going.

The school property now has a drain along one side that feeds into this little drainage.  It’s concrete lined and ends in a pile of rock and gravel where it meets my property.  Workers explained to me that this would keep that water off my property.  They didn’t listen to me when I explained that they had blocked the drainage up hill and that would push water off onto my property.

 Sometimes it’s hard being a member of the general public.  It’s true today that the water racing down the side of the school property is slowed down by the rock and doesn’t come on my property.  It’s also true that a good portion of that water is going up hill toward the drain, not down the drainage.  So far we’re OK.  I’m going to get my camera out in a while and take a picture to send to them.  Email is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

Marilynne 

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