Lenore completed the evening feeding of her chickens and did a check on the plants in her greenhouse and wagon-hoop beds. Everything hummed along nicely, and Lenore cast a look to Brandon’s cabin.
He’d left that morning to run some errands, pick up a few groceries, shower, and then go visit his friends who’d just had a baby. Paul and Brielle had been home from the hospital for a week or so now, and Brandon had finally arranged to go see them.
Lenore had worked on the homestead by herself that day, without a stitch of the desperation, loneliness, and fear that usually accompanied her chores.
She used her time so much more wisely now, from cutting more lumber, cleaning up debris, and adding food and infrastructure to the homestead.
She still didn’t have water on the homestead, and she couldn’t seem to make a decision about drilling a well or buying a water tank. The truth was, she didn’t have the money for either.
She could admit she’d do almost anything for a hot shower in her own bathroom. She’d taken one at Brandon’s cabin lastweek, and it had beenglorious. Showering at the truck stop just wasn’t the same as having a nice bathroom and staying in the hot stream of water for as long as she wanted.
Zona had sent her home with a few more cases of water, and Lenore had been using it as sparingly as possible while still trying to keep her animals and strawberries alive.
Overhead, the sky grumbled, a sound that actually made Lenore smile. It was predicted to rain tonight, and she couldn’t wait to see how her water catchment system worked. She and Brandon had tested it with a couple of gallons of water, and not a drop had been lost.
But it would be different when a real rainstorm arrived, and Lenore hoped her twenty-gallon container would be enough. Since they’d only put the catchment system on the south side of the roof, she only had six hundred square feet to collect with. She’d need to check the sheet Brandon had given her with the calculations, but even in December, a low rainfall month, she remembered it being close to three hundred gallons she could collect.
“For the whole month,” she reminded herself. She dusted off her hands and whistled for the dogs. Together, they went up the back steps, and Lenore washed up with a few tablespoons of water poured over an antibiotic wipe.
She had the means to power a fridge, but she hadn’t made it to town to buy one yet. Rather, she didn’t have the money, and as she set about pulling a bag of shredded cheese from her cooler, she had the thought that perhaps she should go to the bank. Maybe she could get a loan for equipment and supplies on the homestead, and if she had a plan for paying it back, surely they’d give her the money.
Right?
“And how will you pay it back?” she murmured to herself.
She lit the flame under a pan and laid down a tortilla, her mind whirring through her ideas yet again. Honey, jam, eggs, lumber.
Out of all of those, eggs and lumber would be the things she could sell immediately. In fact, she’d been selling five dozen eggs per week to people in Three Rivers, and while that only brought in a few dozen dollars, it wasn’t zero.
As her quesadilla toasted, she plugged in her phone and navigated to the online classifieds for Three Rivers, Amarillo, and Pampa. She’d put off listing her lumber for the past couple of weeks, as she hadn’t run the idea past Brandon yet, and she wanted to talk to him.
But he wasn’t there that night, and if Lenore wanted to go to the bank and propose the idea of a loan, she needed income to repay it.
She quickly made a listing, adding the photos of the raw logs she’d prepped in the past, as well as the planed boards stored in her barn. She’d had to give back the machine Brandon had borrowed from Calvin, but Lenore didn’t worry about that. She had a huge excess of lumber, though Brandon had now built her mini mobile coops and the garden shed that doubled as a wind blind.
She still wanted pastures with strong fences and solid posts, but there were a lot of trees still to cut for that. She didn’t need more structures. She had a way to grow food, raise livestock, and a solar power system now. She could add animals—like turkeys—as funds allowed.
After a moment’s hesitation, she tapped to post the listing and got the notification that it could take up to an hour for her listing to be approved.
Sighing, she leaned back in her chair as the first sounds of rain hitting the roof filled the cabin. A huge smile came toher face, and Lenore hurried to find the paper with Brandon’s calculations.
Then she smelled something burning. “Shoot.” She jumped over to the stove and flipped off the burner, sliding the pan with her smoking dinner back to a cooler burner. “Well, I won’t be eating that.”
The allure of the rain catchment system drew her again, and she returned to her pile of papers—the sketches Brandon had done for everything here on the homestead. Her chicken palace. The hooped garden beds. The greenhouse, with the rain catchment system on the back of it. The water tower. All of it.
“Six hundred square feet,” she muttered as the pinging raindrops continued to hit her tin roof. They’d slide down into the gutter, which Brandon and Colt had covered and tilted slightly to make everything run toward the back corner of the house.
She’d found the twenty-gallon jug here in the house, and she had several ten-gallon containers as well. She may have to go out and change them out as the water accumulated.
She finally found the page and looked at the numbers Brandon had explained to her. “One inch of rain will yield a little over half a gallon per square foot.”
She had six hundred square feet. If it rained an inch tonight, she could collect…three hundred and seventy-five gallons of water.
“It won’t rain that much,” she said out loud. And it wouldn’t. Brandon’s calculations had her being able to collecttwohundred and sixty-five gallons thiswholemonth. Still, it was far cheaper to fill her ten-gallon tanks this way than driving to the grocery store and refilling them every other day.
Lenore looked over to the half-dozen bottles she’d kept and rotated through. It was far cheaper to buy them and refill them, but it still cost about fifty cents per gallon.
“And this is free.”
