To everything there is a season

Under construction September 2021 on the left; decommissioned May 2024 on the right.

Last entry I wrote about getting my life established on this 40 acres, and the need to do hard things. Today I am thinking about the seasons that come and go.

One of the challenges of living on the land in Minnesota is keeping your water from freezing up. The well I dug here in 2021 is great. But the wellhead and pressure tank sat out in the open. They dug the well the same day they moved my trailer house in, and I wouldn’t be ready to move the tank inside until late that summer at the earliest. So instead I built a heated shed to keep my pressure tank from freezing.

I created a concrete slab, built a frame of 2x4s, fit insulation into the gaps, and covered the whole structure with plywood. I wired an outlet into this little house and rigged up a thermostat. Whenever the inside temperature went below 40 degrees, the electricity would kick in. I put two different sources of heat into the house, so that even if one failed my water wouldn’t freeze. I placed a sensor inside with a display in my house so I could see at a glance what the temperature looked like in the wellhouse.

This system functioned amazingly well. I had a heat lamp bulb burn out once, and a power strip outlet failed. Other than that, it’s been problem free for three winters.

Yesterday I removed the wellhouse from its spot. A significant amount of energy went into freeing it from its moorings. Lisa and I were able to use a loader tractor to hoist it up and off the wellhead and pressure tank. I’m not sure what this little house will become. It could be an oversize doghouse, a playhouse for our granddaughter, a roosting shed for four or five chickens. Who knows?

This season is over, and once our new house is in place the waterlines will run into our new basement, and the pressure tank will move indoors.

The change of seasons is a fact of life. Spring follows winter. Summer follows spring. If it did not, something would be terribly broken. There are seasons to life, to relationships, to effort. If the seasons didn’t change, that would mean something was desperately wrong.

I had a twinge of grief yesterday as I worked to free the little wellhouse from its anchors. It was well built, and did its job admirably. The little space heater and the heat lamp that kept my water supply from freezing went into storage, and the wellhouse sits on a pallet in the corner of our yard. They will be repurposed at some point, I’m sure. But needs have changed. That’s a good thing, but I would be a fool not to acknowledge those pangs of grief, even over so small a thing as a wellhouse.

Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote a line in his poem “Spring and Fall: To a young child.” Speaking in the poem to a young girl named Margaret who was weeping over leaves falling from the trees in autumn, he comes to the insight that “it is Margaret you mourn for.” Hopkins’ insight is one of the keys to understanding grief. When we feel a pang, it is most often grief for ourselves, one way or another. Making a choice means we have lost an option. But not to choose also reduces our possibilities. As the band Rush has it, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

So choosing to build a basement, to move a house onto it, to move the pressure tank indoors and bury the waterlines—these are all good things. Yet in the midst of building good things, I need to acknowledge the good of the season that is ending. I need to remember and celebrate the wellhouse and a successful effort to win the battle against frozen water lines. Only then can I let it go in a healthy way, repurpose the wellhouse (and perhaps myself), and move on into a new season.