This past week, my husband took time to cement the road fronting our house. It is rainy season once again and the dirt road becomes muddy. After determining that we can spare money for such a project, he got 2 workers that helped him in mixing and laying the concrete. Now it's a beauty to look at although it still cannot be used for the curing takes at least a week. This morning, I attended the prayer for a departed neighbor and afterwards, talks veered toward the newly cemented road. Our 2 neighbors seemed inspired to have their front cemented although they are quite hesitant with the cost. The head of the local community said that she would try to raise funds and make our road a project so it can be cemented entirely. It's a nice feeling that we have somehow sparked something good.
Most of the in town roads are now paved here; but I can remember when I was growing up in the small town of Sandpoint in northern Idaho, and only main highways and the center of town had paved roads. In the spring, we had what was called "spring thaw", which was when the snow started melting, but the ground underneath was still frozen, so the water runoff could not go down into the ground. The top of the ground turned into thick mud, and rural roads were often completely impassable. Schools were closed for a week or so until the ground thawed enough for the mud to dry out again. Even in town, it was a problem, and cars might be stuck for days when they hit an especially bad bog in the road, and couldn't get the car back out. It was too muddy for other vehicles to get enough traction to pull the stuck car out sometimes. One year, pranksters took the top half of a VW Beetle and put that right in one of the worst potholes and left it there. It looked like some poor car had been almost buried in the mud, and we all got a good laugh when we first realized that it was just a joke.
Only the highway and a few of the roads I grew up around were paved. The road I lived on was paved, probably because there was a church on that road, and there used to be a school. Here in Maine, there is some talk of unpaving some of the lesser used roads due to the high cost of maintaining them, given the damage from frost heaves each spring. I guess they'd break up the pavement and gravel them.
Corie's concrete and rainy season struck a rather nice chord in me because it brought back the remembrance of a rather scary but wonderful incident when I was on staff at the Greenville Rescue Mission in Greenville, S.C. If I remember correctly, it was on a beautiful Friday many years ago and we were pouring slab for a new *troubled youth house*. The weather was perfect for pouring concrete in that it wasn't too hot for a summer day and there wasn't but a few little fluttery types of clouds in the sky but that only lasted until the concrete truck pulled away. The concrete had already been screaded and we were working the bull floats (finishing tools) when a very unexpected gully washer appeared out of no where. It was at the point when everyone was outside the forms and was working the floats with 10' to 15' extensions trying to get a final "rough" finish on the concrete slab. Now, here's the great part of the story: Everyone got drenched in the 15 or so minute downpour but the slab remained untouched! Everything outside the form got soaked but nothing inside the forms received one drop of water that wasn't already there in the mix, hence the name of the location became, "Miracle Hill"! Yeah, I guess this post could have gone in some other board but it seemed appropriate at the time.
While mixing the cement, the weather turned from bad to worse with the heavy rains so my husband assisted the 2 workers in rushing the job. The project actually required 5 mixings (a mixing means 1 bag of cement and 3 bags of sand plus 4 bags of gravel) and it was like they are playing against the weather which was kind of moody that day. After pouring the rain for 15 minutes, the sun would shine so they would start mixing again but right before laying the mixture, there came the rains again. Here is the photo of the road with the first mixing...