When do you encourage floodwaters to swamp your property? Ask Jake.

It must be the Scottish blood. We’re in one of the most severe and prolonged droughts in West Texas history. So when a broken main at the end of the block turned our street into a pair of respectable rivers, Jake saw  an opportunity.

“Get some buckets,” he shouted. “We can’t let this water go to waste.” We started rounding up buckets, and he got the wagon out of the side yard. We scooped water into buckets and tubs and emptied them onto the lawn and various parts of the yard. That wasn’t efficient enough.

Soon Jake had another idea. He rounded up bricks and sheets of plywood, and anything else he thought would help him – to make a dam. And so there it was, a diversion dam that backed water up at our driveway with the intent of sending it down the sidewalk and into our yard.

Thank goodness that didn’t work. If there were a real flood (in this deseret?), we’d like to have that buffer of elevation between us and the street. So the dam served to give us a pretty healthy pool from which to scoop water into tubs and then transport to the lawn and garden.