The Little Things

The Greeley Tribune reported this weekend that debris clean-up from the flood last month could take years.

I believe it.

It's been over three weeks and we still haven't gotten the few minor repairs done to our house. (...mostly because we have been waiting for the ground under the house to dry.)

Our debris field is not massive, but I hope that my parents (at least my dad -- the Lover of Fences) have learned a valuable lesson in keeping numerous fences and buildings around, as items all gathered around them from the north. The pasture fences and yard fences gathered debris in the wires, which in some cases, gathered more debris (a railroad tie? seriously?) and caused some to fall down. There are no fences between my neighbors and I, the fence between the back pasture and my house is non-existent, and there are several more scenarios all around the place in which that same situation exists.

The fence between the yard and the driveway amassed a ton of debris: 5 (!!) grill-sized propane tanks, old windows from my grandparents' farm, portable gas tanks, weeds, sticks, grasses of various specie... And there is not a north-south running horizontal surface of any width greater than a sheet of paper that did not experience a similar amassing.

There are larger pieces of debris that are a bit more wondrous. An industrial-sized freezer is in the yard of the craft house. A piece of wood that will require machinery to lift and transport is adjacent to the driveway. We even had a horse water trough hanging out for a while, until the owner came to rightfully claim it. All along the road there still remains furniture unclaimed: a dresser without fronts on the drawers / cabinets and chairs of various types hang out on the side of the road.

All of that seems doable. Time-consuming, but doable.

It's the little things that cause me consternation.
Like the animals which unfortunately lost their lives in the rapidly rising water and came to rest in fences around the property, or on the ground around the property. It is unfortunate that these animals had to perish this way, but the risk is doubly bad as some of the carcasses we've found have belonged to prairie dogs --sometimes known to carry bubonic plague and rabies -- and the dogs around the place love to help themselves to anything that smells interesting...like rotting carcasses. My parents' dog got loose the other day -- ran out the door behind my ambling, disabled father -- and found a few prairie dog carscasses that he had to proudly display to us and then leave on the deck. Yuck.
Just today my dog, Bailey -- who has been running around the property off-leash for over a year when she needs to answer the call of nature -- found a "smelly, smelly bone" and now "needs a bath badly," according to my mom.

We talked amongst ourselves when we got back into our house that we needed to go and rid the property of bones and toys that were left in the yard when the flooding happened, but now we also need to concern ourselves with the bones and toys that washed in because of the flood -- and these can be found not just in the yard or obvious places, but scattered throughout the flotsam.

Jeez.

It's times like this I wish that I had been working at my present position for numerous months -- perhaps years -- so that I would have more than just two full days' leave to use. (I already used my paid administrative leave.)