Project: Make Parking

Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed.

That first bit there could be a direct quote from Isaiah 40, or it could be about how we aregoing to overcome any and every obstacle to get the farm store opened, or it could be about how we made our parking lot. To be totally honest with you, I’d have to say it is in reference to all three of those options. This blog post, however, is merely about the parking lot.

To start off, I cannot overstate how helpful my Uncle Scott was in the whole process. He brought his tractor down and worked from dawn to dusk for two days until the ordinary plot of land in front of the store had been transformed into something extraordinary.

In preparation for the making of a parking area, we (when I say we, I really mean my Dad) researched all of the different options. We talked it over and decided to go with a gravel driveway. My Dad andUncle Scott had been talking about it for a while, and we set up a weekend to make things happen. Dad called the local gravel pit company, and bada boom bada bing (in this context, bada boom bada bing can roughly be translated as saying that big trucks came and dumped many rocks into big piles), we had mountains to make low.

It is cold outside right now, but it was not cold outside that weekend.At one point, I think it got as low as 92. Uncle Scott sat upon his New Holland steed, bidding it to do miracles. Meanwhile, us lower peons raked the stones, raked the stones, and then for some extra fun, raked the stones. I want to send a big thank you to my Uncle Mark, who came over to join us for peon work for all of that Saturday. I believe he even skipped a Cubs game in the afternoon (I am pretty sure they lost anyway, so we were really the ones helping him in that we kept him from a great source of misery and regret).

I also got to run the tamper for a while. That is a really heavy box of a machine that packs down whatever is beneath it… which in this case was usually gravel (I occasionally may not have steered so well). All in all, we worked long and hard, and I don’t think any of us cried, but we were all sweating so much that we could have been weeping rivers without anybody noticing.

The parking lot is one more thing that is now checked off of our list to make the store a reality. Now, when people come from miles away, they will be able topull right in, park next to the other dozens of cars (disclaimer: our parking lot will not fit dozens of cars), and back out with plenty of space before they would be in danger of running into something. Let’s all take a moment to celebrate that I won’t have to mow as much anymore! Now let’s all take a moment to lament that I will have to plow/shovel a lot more. Such is life.