The Prairie Spy

Alan “Lindy” Linda

I am looking south through the large glass windows of this house. Large glass windows that I installed 40-plus years ago because of winter. And the heat loss in the winter through those large windows? Lots, but how wonderful it is to sit here and see the world out there, as summer goes to autumn goes to winter.

It helps keep me sane, this view from a house that is extremely protected from the winds out of the west and northwest and north, winds that are in fact blowing quite obnoxiously hard right now. One can only tell that because way out there to the south, there is a lot of blowing snow crossing the open field of partially harvested field corn, a large field that separates me from the county highway.

It’s fun to see it. It’s fun to sit here thumbing our noses at it.

And it has been fun to do that, these 40-plus years.

In the last few years, the Amish have been moving in, buying farmsteads or bare land, the price of which, compared to the high-priced land from whence they came, is relatively cheap.

So there is now something new to look at through these large south windows. A young Amish family has purchased some land across the road. (We are on a long driveway. The county road is way out there.)

They are not directly across the road, but off to the west a bit, and they’re not clearly visible, but are just barely so through the trees over there. We just catch a glimpse of their new roof. And maybe, depending upon the wind direction, see some smoke from their wood-burning cook stove. Fun. “Look,” Lt. S might say to me, “ they just stoked up their wood stove.”

Okay. It’s winter. It doesn’t take much to amuse us, retired as we are and sitting on the sofa drinking coffee and watching winter blow by out there.

I approached this young Amish fellow a while ago and mentioned to him that I had the large hand-operated well pump from the farm I grew up on–and that my father grew up on—which I dragged up here, thinking I might need it someday.

I also have the pumpjack for that type of well. Growing up, one of my jobs was to throw down silage, feed the stock cattle and steers, and plug in the electric motor which operated that pumpjack, a device which simulates the hand pumping of a person. That pumpjack brought water up from one of the first wells that was driven on that farmstead, in the early 1900’s.

My dreams of using it have faded away, so I offered that old pump stuff to this young Amish man, who was struggling to get by on a limited budget.

And he just got it installed yesterday. Dropped a pump cylinder and the connecting rod and nearly 90 feet of inch-and-a-quarter galvanized pipe down into the well by hand. (In case you’ve never done anything like this, guess how heavy that much iron pipe is? Wow.)

As soon as this snow storm quits, and I can find an excuse to do so, I’m going to go over there and ask for a drink of water that a pump system from Iowa helped raise.

Bet it will taste real good.