Miracles, intruders

Friday I took a ½ day vacation but before I left the office I was able to get with one of the right-of-way people in the office to have him look at the paperwork I got from the oil company. He looked everything over and asked me to call the person whose contact information was on the lease agreement paperwork. I did and got a lot of questions answered.


The first is that we do – by their research – own the mineral rights to 17.5 acres of our farm. It is almost unheard of (i.e. miraculous) so they did a thorough job of tracking it down. They went through the records in the Montague County Courthouse, all of them recorded in books – hand written – back to 1924. The property and mineral rights were tracked through several owners to me and Mama.

Only by the grace of God did that little patch of property and mineral rights get overlooked until January 2013. By Mama and me buying the property eighty nine years later, they transferred to us. It is not much but it is enough to control what happens on the surface of out 58 acres. I can include some exclusions that will make it work mostly in our favor when any drilling is done.

I was told that it is not in any of the newer plans being drafted at the moment to include our property in the drilling plans but we can not know for sure at this point. All I can do is make it less attractive for them to choose our little farm for that purpose. I should be able to complete the paperwork and get it sent out today or tomorrow.

Several days ago Mama suggested to Grandpa that he try one more time to get the tiller repaired. It was not getting gas through the carburetor so we were going to have to take it to a shop and pay whatever was required to get it operational again. I walked out on Saturday afternoon and he had the tiller out of the shed and was starting to take the carburetor off for one more try. It took about an hour and after we got it back together, after about the fourth try, it started running properly; another answer to prayer.

We praised the Lord and walked it over to the garden and put it to work. It was good to have it working again and Grandpa and I ran it for a couple hours getting the garden ready for the early plants we will begin to set this week. Onions are the first to go out here since they are frost tolerant. They are so tolerant that I picked about a dozen that were still growing in the garden from last summer. Mama and Grandpa will go to work on that today or tomorrow.

When Mama and I were on our way home from church Sunday morning we stopped at Brookshire Brothers in Bowie to get some things Mama needed to get her Friendship Bread prepared for baking. As we got out of the car Grandma pulled up. She was on her way to the nursing home to visit. She told us to make sure and look at the little birdhouse Grandpa put up at the corner of the driveway. We would see what he had been working on that morning.

When we got home, we did see. At the base of the cedar post on which the birdhouse sits was a huge raccoon. It turns out that the dogs had treed the coon that morning in the tree in the front yard of the farm house. Dodger was trying to climb the tree to get to the intruder and there was such a commotion that Grandpa decided to shoot it. I am glad he did since a coon that size would decimate our chickens in a couple nights. If it had not been Sunday, I would have tried to skin it but I did not want the clean up associated with such a task.

We saved the tail for Grant and Blake.