summer

the sound of my childhood summers is, without question, the irrigation pump. because rains were always few and far between during the heat of the summer, the time when corn grows the most, water was always being pumped to some irrigation, somewhere on our land.

you knew it was summer when to my father’s dinner-time prayer the phrase, “and God please bring the rains” was added. he never prayed for any other weather phenomenon that i remember (although in the middle of february, in a seasonal-depression induced slump my mother and i prayed fervently for a variety of weather phenomenon and i knew my brother prayed for snow so he could snowmobile. i wondered how God handled it when He was getting conflicting prayers from under the same roof).

the irrigation pump was at the end of our long driveway. once someone told me that i lived “in the house with the leaky irrigation pump at the end of the dirt driveway.” yes, that was it. forget all the trees or the windmill or any other landmarks, the leaky irrigation was forever the marker of our residence. although the pump never broke, it always leaked, so we always had a puddle in the grassy (or it would have been grassy had it not been so perpetually wet) space between the driveway and the next field. in the heat and humidity of july and august, this pool of water became a stagnant breeding ground for all types of algae, slime and scum.

it didn’t matter where you were in the house, as long as a window somewhere was open, you could hear the pump’s constant whirr. it never wavered, never clicked, never squeaked, never changed. twenty years i listened to the pump and nothing about it ever faltered. the same parts were always rusted (nothing new or different decided it needed to rust, too) it never faded or a new leak never came to be. whatever leaked had simply leaked since the beginning of time.

i wonder how many hours of his life my dad spent at that pump: turning it on and off, using the water from it to fill his sprayer, turning a knob to change the water’s flow. it was his home office, the place where he took a lot of cell phone calls and helped his assets- his corn- to grow.

summer was over when the pump turned off for the last time. when its whirr wasn’t in the air, it was deathly quiet- the quiet of fall and winter. it always astonished me how silent winter was outside if you just stood there. then i realized that if you just stood there in summer you would hear birds, frogs, insects and a steady irrigation pump that never slept.