We need water to water our plants and bath ourselves, but not to a cat! They will do anything to avoid getting wet.

 

No wind!

When we moved onto our smallholding there was an old rusty windmill. And when the wind didn’t blow there was no fresh water. 

My husband would come home from work and pick up a large bucket and go to the village post office’s outside tap to get water. 

He would put the water bucket in our pickup truck and take it home to us. We call a small pickup truck, a `bakkie’ in South Africa. It’s an Afrikaans term that has become a beloved jargon word. 

My husband couldn’t keep doing that, the post office people would soon complain.  

So it wasn’t long before he installed a submersible pump down at the bottom of the windmill’s shaft, with the help of our youngest son. 

Should you clean out reservoirs?

As I said before, there was a reservoir already there, when we moved onto the smallholding.  

Before the submersible pump was installed, when the wind blew the water was naturally pumped back along a pipe towards and into the reservoir. 

• That was great, because there was always water in the reservoir then. Until my husband thought he would renovate and repair the reservoir.  
• So he drained out the water, cleaned off the moss and sealed the cracks with cement and painted the inner brick walls with swimming pool paint. 

Let me explain what happened next, with a true story with what happed in Chile many years ago. 

The importance of moss:

Water ducts were built anciently high up in the Andes Mountains in South America.  

Anciently the ducts were built and ran down the mountainside to supply water to the towns down by the seaside, also supplying water to villages along the way down. 

Over many years, green moss formed on the rock slabs that made up the duct waterways. The moss sealed off the cracks between the slabs naturally. 

Then one day, in modern times, a town engineer decided that with modern pipe systems, they no longer needed the ancient ducts.  

But as the years went by the modern metal pipes became rusty. And to fix the modern system they needed to use the ancient ducts again, until the new fresh pipes were  put in and were working.  

But they hit a big problem. The ancient ducts were no longer coated with moss and the water linked out the ducts. No water reached the villages or the towns by the sea. 

The moral of the story:

With no moss, our reservoir would never held water until moss grew there again. 

And once there was water in the reservoir and there were leaks, reeds grew again alongside the reservoir wall. 

Then one Christmas holidays:

We filled up the reservoir so the family could swim in it. But we had to keep topping it up with water. I must say once the water became slimy we didn’t have to fill it so often. 

And our cat was truly happy when the weaver birds came back to nest in the reeds close to the reservoir wall. The reservoir became her favourite place to be and sneak up on the weaver birds. 

Ever seen a cat walk on water?

One day when our cat was stalking along the top of the reservoir wall. So content on watching the weaver birds, that it didn’t see my husband coming. 

My husband saw the cat and couldn’t help himself. 

He crept up to the cat and suddenly pushed it off the wall and it landed in the water. And as you know cats don’t like water. Well you never saw anything like it… 

To this day my husband said the cat did a Jesus miracle. It walked on water! It was so quick to jump out the water that it never got wet! It just shook it paws and walked off disgusted! 

My husband likes to tell another story too:

About another cat that walked on water. A friend of his told him what happened to him. 

You see, the friend was walking along the beach when he saw an elderly gentleman with a sack in his hand. So he stopped and asked, “What have you got there?” “

A very old sick cat” said the man. 

“Oh, don’t drown it!” 

“I have to. Its dying anyway and I want to put it out of its misery quickly! But I can’t swim far out. Can you do it for me?” 

Well this friend of my husband said, “Oh, I don’t like people drowning cats. But I see your concern.” So he took the sack by the bound top and started walking into the surf. 

When he got deep enough, he had to swim.

Aaah! That’s when the cat came alive! Really alive! It fought so much in the sack that the sack boost open and the cat promptly jumped on top of the friend’s head, with its claws locked and buried in his head. 

It was so sore, that the friend ducked his head under the water. And every time he came up to the surface the cat would jump on his head, again and again. 

He happened to notice the gentleman on the shore laughing fit to kill himself! 

So the friend dived deep this time and swum a long way under the water. And when he came up again, there he saw the cat was on the beach sand shaking itself and licking its paws! 

Clearly not an old cat after all!! 

And the old gentleman was nowhere to be seen!!!