It was suppertime Monday when I took this picture looking through our kitchen window. Those swamped trees are 10 or 15 feet from the west wall. You see the birdfeeder stuck onto the glass, and the two lit candle flames on the table next to me.

Scott has shovelled out a second trench through the bush and a friend brought us a third pump to use. This trench is swiftly moving water from the south end of the garden to the ditch along the road running past the farmyard.

I’m told that our yard will look a bit like a construction site this summer, because the weeping tile around the house has to be replaced and you can’t even re-seed grass the first year. Maybe because the ground needs time to settle first? I’m guessing.

“Fun and games,” as Scott says.

I was up till three in the morning, but didn’t have to do anything as the water minded its Ps and Qs, although it rained, and hard, the whole time. I tried to watch a horrible old movie starring Elizabeth Taylor, Mia Farrow and Robert Mitchum, called Sacred Ceremony.Very poor. Yikes. Fortunately I have a new stack of library books and was reading Thirteen Steps Down, by Ruth Rendell. It’s not any great mystery — yet — but it beats that tale on TV. Oy.