Abigail’s junior varsity volleyball season is over. The T-Rebs finished 28-4 overall and 11-1 in district play. They won their district, as did the varsity, but there is no playoff for the JV as there is for the varsity so the JV is done for the season.
Friday night Kari, Joyce and I drove to Midland to watch Abigail’s next to last game of the season. We’ve watched her team put away a lot of opponents in two games this season. An Odessa team they played recently didn’t even get out of single digits in two games, which was a little boring to watch. Friday night was a different matter, though. The two teams were evenly matched. The Rebs took the first game but dropped the second one, both close games. They led the third game mostly and had a comfortable five point lead at 22-17, I say comfortable and normally that would have been but the Bulldogs lived up to their name and mounted a charge that brought them back to put the score at 24-23. Things were tense but the T-Reb’s #8, playing the front row and displaying remarkable agility, determination and beauty, returned a ball at the net to score the final point. Abigail played a good game all evening, including a miraculous save and her winning shot made the long drive home a lot easier for her mother and elderly ancestors.
When the folks first bought Six Acres, a fence was built around it about 12 feet inside the property line to create a bridal path around the place. Or maybe the fence was there when they bought SA, I don’t know. Anyway, the fence was in bad repair and Dad began that process sometime in the late 50’s. He started in the northeast corner by disinterring the corner post and moving it out to the property line, as he would all the posts over the next 10 or 15 years. Those corner posts have at least a 100 pounds of concrete at the base and I remember Dad struggling to get that post out of the ground because I helped him, or tried. I wasn’t much help, I’m sure, being a young boy and all. The post was too heavy to lift out of the hole; he had to use a crowbar as a lever to pry it out. Chris and I removed a couple of similar posts when I replaced the fence along the street at 1911 and it gave us all the work we wanted. Dad pretty much did it by himself.
So the section of fence along the northeast of SA has been in place for over 50 years and was showing some wear. Over the years tree limbs have fallen on it, particularly on the southern half of the section, and ne’er-do-wells have crawled over it, mashing down the chain link in the process. The top and bottom support wire were slack, rusted and patched and just barely served their purpose. Then there was the problem of weeds in the easement. Over the last ten plus years I’ve turned over in my mind several solutions to the weed problem, how I could keep the weeds from infecting SA. Finally I decided the cheapest and easiest way would be to have a gate through the fence so I could keep the weeds down in the easement. Last week I installed the gate, one Chris had used for his dog run and which he no longer needed, and this week my friend Doc and I took the section from the gate south down and restored it. We primed and painted the posts using spray paint. I didn’t want to redo the fence without repainting the posts but felt painting them with a brush like Dad had done would take too long. The two of us going over the posts with a wire brush, priming them, then painting them (black), worked well and got the job done fairly quickly. We stretched new support wires and spent quite a bit of time straightening out the kinks in the chain link. With the chain link reattached and stretched, I think that section of the fence is solid. It still shows bends and bows from the abuse it got over the years but it should serve its purpose for the next 50 years. It took us two days to refurbish that section of fence and sometime next year I hope we can tackle the other half of the northeast section.
No quail sightings this week but we’ve seen the cottontail around. It appears to have claimed the place as home. Perhaps it will propagate. I hope it does.