Water Supply

I promised to tell this story, although it is a recent one and out of place in this somewhat sequential narrative. It was the capstone of my relationship with a man who claims to be someone he is not, and brought down his wrath on me that he had reserved, until then, for my husband.

He never did understand my attachment to my husband. After my mother in law died, for two years, we had FIL over for Sunday dinner. He always ate a lot. For me, someone who avoids cooking, and my husband, who prefers to graze and then take a nap, it was an extra effort. FIL needed someone to talk to, so after the meal, which he ate with relish, my husband would disappear into his basement TV room and leave me to be the audience FIL sought.

I listened to his ramblings, usually lasting at least an hour, sometimes two or more, about his genius inventions, the books he had recently read on how we should improve ourselves, his financial status (he would go to the bank weekly just to ask the financial adviser what he should do with his money, to which the financial adviser said, "Let me sell you an annuity. . . ")

Plus he would not only make excuses for the Twins' bad behavior, but harangue my husband's actions, and I refused to listen to it. He couldn't understand why I wouldn't sit still for it. My nephew told him that I loved my husband, whom I consider to be my eternal companion, and I didn't want to listen to constant criticism. In FIL's mind, constant criticism is a sign you want to help somebody. After all, he'd used it for years on his wife.

For several years, FIL kept a garden on the rented pasture of the little house next door to our house. He had a garden spot at his own house, but it was too shaded by trees and he had shifted his pipes and soaker hoses and fences to a plot we did not own. After MIL's death we built the new calf pen by his house, and the trees were removed, leaving a large open area for him to return to his original garden. But he did not return to it except for a patch of tomatoes.

Let me add that the pasture garden was positioned over where a septic drainfield ought to have been. Since there was no drainfield for the little house next door, there was human waste floating along the bottom of this garden. He built a little bridge over it, but it was unmistakable that this should not be near produce that would be eaten by humans. He parked the pickup with half of the back sticking into the road, creating a driving hazard. He also drove back and forth in front of my house probably three to five times a day to work on this garden, at a mile a trip, making it a matter of 25 or more miles a week he spent driving back and forth, inspecting my yard for the errant misuse of water along the way.

Since his pasture-garden shared a 2" water pipe meant for my large yard of flowers and vegetables and trees and lawn (my husband installed the pipe from the irrigation ditch 30 years previously, and they had added not only a bib for the neighbor's sprinkler system and pasture sprinklers as well as FIL's garden) I had such little water pressure anymore that I couldn't run my sprinkler system and had to drag hoses with screwed-on sprinklers to keep my yard from dying.

One year my husband and I were overseas, and our youngest son and his wife were staying at our house during 105 degree weather. I asked my daughter in law to water my garden, and she had two sprinklers running. When FIL saw this, he stopped in our yard, ran into MY house, and in front of their young visitors, he reamed my son & daughter in law for using TWO sprinklers at once, because his garden didn't have enough water. An example of the shabby treatment he gave to those who dared cross him.

I was incensed when I learned of this, but I did not do anything at the time, believing FIL when he said he was going to move his garden back to his house. But in the spring he could be seen in the carry-all passing back and forth in front of our house with loads of manure for his pasture garden. He was expanding the garden to accommodate the neighbors living in the little house, who wanted a garden of their own as well.

I confronted him one day on it, telling him that he could not have my water anymore and he needed to tell the neighbors they couldn't have my water, either. He needed to move his garden and he would have all the water he needed.

He refused of course, on the principle that everything he saw was his and for me to even suggest he had been less than righteous about it was an intolerable sin on my part. Still, he tried to give me one more chance: he approached me one day while I was mowing the lawn, and told me he would just use the water at night.

Since water volume is usually higher at night in the ditches, he was making a grab for more than half of my water. I told him he was not entitled to half of my water, and that he needed to move his garden.

Besides, knowing him, this offer was a downright falsehood, since I knew he would not keep it. He would continue to use all the water he wanted, which meant keeping it going full volume every night and day, as he had in the past.

From then on it was war.

This man refused to come to my house anymore on Sundays for lunch. I can't say it broke my heart, since he was not pleasant company. We invited him later to resume coming but he refused, saying he could not talk to me anymore. He told all of his children how awful I was and how unfair and how my mean intentions and refusal to let him have all the water he wanted was going to ruin his garden. He threatened my husband with not watering the pasture anymore (not that he had done it regularly anyway). He now included me in his condemnations of his son, saying that we were both going to end up in hell because of our un-Christian conduct.

I had been demoted. I was shunned. He no longer came to visit me at odd times when my husband was working. I was no longer his financial adviser. I was a bug to be squashed, my eternal salvation of deep and abiding concern to him, meaning that I was now the subject of constant criticism as well.

Initially I started digging around where the feeder pipe was supposed to be, hoping to shut it off, but I gave that up and just let him use whatever water he wanted. I made do with what water there was as I had done before. He was greedy and entitled as usual, and whenever the volume of water decreased (usually by his own mistaken actions) he would complain loudly to my husband how unfair we were to poor innocent tomato gardener. It was a demonstration of narcissism up close, a clinical case.

Eventually his complaints, falling on the deaf ears of the sane sisters, became a determination to move his entire garden to the spot next to his house, which was a far superior place to garden, since he was able to divert manure water onto it. Eventually the story would change that he'd always wanted it that way and never really argued about water, but that I was ungracious anyway. We never asked him back to Sunday lunch, knowing he would use it for some other reason to deprive us of his divine company.

Early the next year, the absentee owner of the little house next door died, and his heirs promptly sold the property out from under the renters, but not before they put in a septic drainfield. They warned my FIL to move his pipes and fence and soaker hoses, and he had to do it in a hurry. The field is clean now, there is no human waste, there is no scrambled, weedy, overwatered garden. I love my neighbors, they plan to trench a pipe from the irrigation ditch and allow me all the water in the 2" pipe without having to share it with anyone.

And I can run my sprinklers.