When Water And Gravity Mix

It's been such a rainy, stormy 2015 in Iowa. We laugh that it always rains on Danny's day off, but that's been the truth for the past couple of months. It's difficult to keep up with work on the property when it's either storming or flooding. The ground is so saturated that it hasn't been able to keep up.

The other dramatic effect of the rain is what it does to our driveway. It's a pretty steep incline, and torrential downpours cause huge crevices in the gravel as it flows downhill. A car can make it up and down, but it's a jarring, jolting trip. It's pretty amazing to see how weather works, but it's not so much fun to get sloshed about trying to get home.

It always makes me think about the pioneer days, how they would have handled traveling through across the country with no roads at all. Their roads and land would have looked much like this after the rain, too, and wagon wheels would have had much more trouble getting through these ruts than our modern vehicles do.

The gravel all piles up at the bottom and on the side of the driveway after those heavy rains. Danny switches out attachments on the tractor, pushes it all back into place and then smooths it all down. We can't pave it because the slope would be too steep to get up in the winter snow, so this is the natural alternative. Hopefully we're done with the dramatic weather for the summer so we can work on some other projects.