“What’s got your father in such a low mood?” she asked quietly.
“Cows in the mud at the pond again,” I muttered, taking the towel gratefully. “I told him we should sell them.”
“He’s convinced the rain is coming,” she sighed, then shrugged easily in that gentle, patient way of hers. “Daddy is doing his best. We all are.”
I couldn’t sleep that night. There was so little I could control. I couldn’t make it rain; I couldn’t make Dad face reality; I couldn’t move the cows away from the mud.
My family accepted it was a problem that could not be solved. But in the depth of that night, I considered the same situation and decided it didn’t have to be a problem at all.
The next morning, I pulled a wide leather hat over my orange-red hair and popped the collar up on one of Henry’s old shirts to protect my neck from the sun. Then I took a shovel and I walked back to the pond.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” Henry asked. It was lunchtime but I was still working, so Mother sent him down with a lunch pail and some water. If I’d been a little dirty the previous day, I was utterly filthy now that I’d been shoveling sloppy mud for hours.
“Exactly what you told me to. I stopped assuming the worst and started expecting rain.”
I stuck the shovel into the firmer mud so that it stood upright, then dropped onto my haunches beside the pond. Henry watched with obvious amusement as I tried to clean off my hands so I could eat the sandwiches. After just a moment or two, I realized that was a futile exercise and I was famished, so I picked up the sandwiches anyway.
“So what’s the plan?” Henry asked, squatting beside me.
“I’m going to scrape every bit of wet soil from the pond to expand its capacity.”
Henry looked from me to the pond, then back to me incredulously.
“That will take you days.”
“Yep.” I narrowed my eyes at him. “Unless someone helps me.”
He threw back his head and laughed.
“You’re crazy, sis.”
Henry went back to plowing with Dad that afternoon. Mother came down and helped me for a while, but she had her own jobs to do, so didn’t stay long.
And for three long days, mostly on my own, I scooped and dug and smoothed mud all over the dried field in a thin layer, so it was no longer a danger to the cattle. With no alternative, the cows finally figured out they needed to use the trough.
We sold the cows a few months later anyway, when their ribs started to show through their skin. The price of fodder had gone up so fast we couldn’t justify the cost to keep them. By then, the market was flooded with skinny cows just like them, so we sold those girls for a pittance.
The pond was soon a huge, dried crater in the field—twice the depth it was once, ready to store a heap more water than it ever had before.
I was a realist who loved my land and my life enough that when a moment called for it, I thought nothing of working until my hands were red-raw if it meant turning a problem into an opportunity.
That was the kind of girl I was, once upon a time.