The Rain 2 - WfW 22/1 - 2nd Part

Words for Wednesday 22 January as given by Mark:
    Deviled                    and / or           Gargled
     Interdependence                             Presence
     Watery                                            Yelling
     Figs                                                Andalusia
     Zoom                                              Snowdrifts
     Headphones                                   Exfoliate

 For this installment I used: Andalusia, Exfoliate and Figs. 
Now we are back in Two Hills.

The next day was a day of frantic preparation in Two Hills. The sky was grey and overcast.
We built yet another house on stilts - this time ramming the slender trunks down, until they touched solid ground below the top of the brown fluff.
  Mary and her veggie crew carried stones, and put them into holes. We had been at it for about an hour when  Minna asked: "How much did the fluff shrink?"
  "It shrunk to less than a third, but the problem is not shrinking, it's the flow off or washing off or what you'd like to call it. When the rains come, all this - which I take for the fertile part of the surface - will inevitably be washed into the seas around us."
  "No, it won't" Minna said. "It'll be washed from the high grounds for sure. But there's enough low or lower grounds here for the fluff to stay in and sink eventually. I think we really should work on building dry place for us, not try to contain the brown stuff."
  "My, I think you're right. I remember looking at one of those maps with: 'Will your house be swamped in those rains that happen once in 50 years' or something equally inane worst case scenario from our insurance company. Our house was safe, but lots of light and darker blue patches marked large poodles and mini lakes where the water would pool up. It's almost the same here." Let's get to building for us instead.
  All day we worked, not fast, but almost continuously. And when the rain began falling in the evening, gently at first, then with more and more power, we had a roof over our heads, and the first house, we had built, was secured against the waters and contained all our stuff. Sturdy ropes connected the two huts.
  Our living space has no walls, but the roof hang over the floor all the way around - far out, so that the rain could not get at us. Getting cold was not a problem for us yet, but becoming wet would be.
  It was not a good looking home, struts and branches criss-crossed in to me crazy patterns, but Ben promised that they would hold up against strong winds, barring a hurricane. He began talking about triangles and tensile strength. Words, that made my head swim, but I patiently asked him to explain the basics again and again until most of us had grasped it.
  "We have to learn," I said. "No more we can afford thinking: 'it is not my job to know this'. Pooled together we might pull through. But one or more of us could fall ill, meet an accident or something. We all have to teach and learn. And I think that the coming, rainy days are best used with this."
  "The only thing I'm really good at, is adding and subtracting numbers," Pete said.
  "That might be what your job  was, and maybe even what you're best at, Minna gently teased him, "But you're a health freak as well. I bet some of that knowledge about, oh vitamins, amino acids and so on will come in handy. You teach us that, not accounting. We all know more than we think, more than our job consisted of surely. And we have to pass as much as possible of this knowledge on to more of our group. Mary's right. Something could happen to any of us at the drop of a hat. Paleontology might not be the most useful subject either, but I was an avid baker in my spare time, and I had a go at fermenting vegetables. Both of these might become necessary skills in the times to come."

The rains began early in the night. We lay awake, listening, for some time, there was nothing we could do, except hope and pray. We each had our most treasured belongings in a bag, or small suitcase or box next to us in the people's hut. I had the seeds, my diary and a few other prized possessions inside the big cooler box, and my old, worn backpack was still loaded with personal items. Almost no water was seeping through our roof, and we were quite sure the same would be the case over in the storage hut. The rain was falling heavily, but not a wind was stirring. The edges of the flooring had a few drops only.
  The steady rain was like a lullaby, and all slept peacefully far int the morning. Next day the weather was cooler, not cold, it sure was not, as we guessed it to be still in the lower 30es. As we looked out, the world looked different. It was wet, for one thing, and all the brown fluff had gathered in the shallow valleys and depressions. They were dark, and I went down to look at one of them while Ben and Sally checked our storage hut.
  After a breakfast of fresh waster, stale cakes and canned figs from Andalucia we agreed that a fire hut would be a welcome addition to our small settlement.

  I went out and filled a big bowl with water-soaked fluff. It had turned black, and was fluffy no more. It reminded me most of all of those small compressed peat plant pots. You bought a box of discs, but as they soaked up water, they grew into a small pot ready for planting. The only difference was that this stuff contracted when wet instead of expanding. I distributed the earth into shallow containers and me and the children planted seeds in them, while Jill either took care of baby June, or looked through and sorted our edibles. Some of the fruits and vegetables had suffered during the trek and the busy day yesterday had left us no time sorting them. Only one orange was rotten, and luckily none of the other fruits, not even the susceptible pears had caught the mold. Jill rinsed and dried the unharmed edibles, stowing them in towels, bags and other containers hanging them under the roof. She placed the damaged, but edible fruits in a big bowl, ready for lunch.
After planting the seeds, I carefully cut small squares of cardboard.
  "What now, Granny?" Janet asked.
  "Now we have to write what we planted. In some weeks, we cannot remember, and it is important not to mistake swedes for carrots later on."
  "Yuck, I do not like swedes."
  "The more reason not to mistake them," I said smiling. I handed her a square of cardboard, a black marker and the seed-bag with swedes in it. Pointing at the word, I said: "That word says 'Swedes', copy that onto your square, then you'll know where they are."
I handed Lil'George some squares, and the blue marker. "You can handle the broad beans, the carrots and the spinach."
"You bet. I'll mark that spinach, so I won't accidentally eat it," Lil'George said.
"Me too mark plants," Gregor said.
"Do you know some letters?" I asked him.
"Me know 'G'," he said.
"Not quite enough, we do it together," I told him. "We'll mark the corn and the chilies, They both begin with 'C'. I held his hand with the marker, and together we made a good job of marking all the seeds we had planted.
Jill praised our work in passing.

"Ohh, my hands are itching," Janet said.
As she said this I noticed that I too had been rubbing my hands against my trousers repeatedly. "Mine too," I said. "I think we need to wash our hands very thoroughly whenever we have been touching that earth stuff. My feet and legs are itchy too." I  dug some of my homemade soap out of my backpack, and we went out into the warm rain and washed and washed. In the beginning the soap stung, but it soon stopped and the itching with it.
As we stood there in the rain, Ben. Minna, Pete, Sally and George returned home from the woods loaded with timber. I handed them the soap and told them to wash all parts of them that had been in contact with the wet fluff.
Not a few of them walked far off, stripped and washed.
"Why is earth itching" Janet asked, "I do not like itchy earth."
"I don't know," I admitted. "Maybe there's something like itsy bitsy splinters in it, maybe it's just corrosive, a bit like my green soap. I would not know without somebody with a microscope or a lot of test tubes and chemicals to test this for me."
 
"Soap!" I said," as we ate a lunch of greens and lebkuchen. "Soap is one of the better commodities of modern times. But how are we going to make more soap when we run out? I did not bring more than a couple for my own use, and some for gifts."
"But, you can make soap, can't you, Mom? Jill asked.
"Yes I can, but not from thin air and bananas!" I need fats and oils and lye to make it from. Where will I get that? No animals means no fats."
"Sunflower seeds, hemp seeds, and linseed can all be pressed to make oils"  Pete said. "Would they do?"
"I'd suppose so, I just don't know how, But live and learn must be our new motto. I dare bet I could even make an exfoliating soap using some poppy seeds - yes I bought flower seeds as well. I am a dreamer, and I love flowers."

In the middle of the disaster this was a surprisingly normal day. We could have been in some primitive cottage in the mountains somewhere. Now the eternal silence was covered by the rain and that very same rain in our heads at least accounted for not seeing anybody else. We ate, we played cards, we build with sticks, trying to make a small kitchen space for a covered fire. All very primitive, but me and Allan had been taking out children hiking in the wild since they could walk. The air too felt more normal, thicker, richer somehow.

to be continued