2nd Earth 2: Emplacement (26 page)

I hope that won’t be for a long while though, and until then I will enjoy living with our extended family and help any other families that may need our help along the way. The long winter nights allow us to catch up on our reading. We still stop at any and all libraries and stores that sold books to see if there are any that we haven’t already found. I don’t think we have ever come out empty handed from one of those places. It’s a good thing we have so much help, because with the twins, Becky definitely needs it. Every time Sara, Jenna, or Morgan come over, which is pretty much every day, they tell me I have to start giving Dayna, Robin, Melissa, and Becky some rest from having babies. Sara told us it looks like we are starting our own personal daycare center. At least we can all laugh with each other because we know that we all depend on each other for our very lives, and I can’t think of anyone, anywhere, I would rather trust with mine.

Tonight at dinner, Dayna and Robin told me that Sara, Jenna, Morgan, and Lindsay went to see Doc Betty today. Naturally I am concerned when four members of our family are not feeling well, until Melissa says that they will feel much better in about six months. All four of our friends, along with their husbands walk in at that moment, so Becky tells them it looks like someone else is working on their own day care center. There is some good natured bantering back and forth, but we are all very happy for them. They all say they will have to spend more time at our house now, especially at meal time, so that they can learn how to take care of babies. I knew that I would wind up getting the worst of it somehow. Now I will have to put up with even more cantankerous females. My sons come over to me when we are all laughing and harassing each other. They tell me we will do this like we do everything, together. None of us can argue with that logic, besides we are all looking forward to spending a lot of time together this winter, getting ready for spring. None of us would want it any other way.

Ten Years Later

              Hello everyone, I’ve missed visiting with you, but the farm keeps us pretty busy. You should see this place now. We run like a well oiled machine, well almost. We have learned pretty much all that we need to know, to keep our little piece of this beautiful earth running, if not quite so smoothly sometimes. We seem to always have enough, even if there is a setback and we don’t get the crops that we expected when we planted them. When you depend on the weather you have to expect that it will not always cooperate, but we have always planted more than we need, so in good years we have more than we need, and in bad years we use some of the excess from good years. I think the worst job we had to tackle was putting in a septic system, but even that wasn’t all that bad. Like everything else we researched it and did it. We know without a doubt that there are people who could do the job faster and probably even better, but it works when the job is complete so what more can we ask for.

              When last we talked, I told you about the other groups that were starting up in several states around us, the Midwest, and even farther out west. We stay in contact with several of the groups and so far they are all doing well. For a lot of the groups we kind of set the standard, because most of them have visited and took a lot of ideas home with them. Our groups have not been attacked in several years now, because we are very well prepared for anything like that. We make sure everyone knows that we are prepared to fight, and are more than willing to do whatever it takes to protect each other. About seven or eight years ago there was a pretty big threat from a large band, of what we call predators, riding around looking for settlements to take women and young girls from. We knew that they were listening in on the radio, whenever we would talk to the other groups around the country, so we made it clear that if any groups were attacked we would hunt down those responsible, and retribution would be swift and harsh.

              As far as we know none of the groups that we communicate with regularly were ever attacked. In fact our group, as well as some of the others, had several men come and ask to join. They admitted that they had been riding with some other guys that wanted to cause trouble, but they had seen how we live, and decided it was easier and much safer to join us. We watched them closely and not one of them ever caused any trouble, or left because the work was too hard. We no longer have anywhere near as many single women as we did have. There are also only a few of us who are married to more than one woman. In our family it has worked out great, even if we have had to build an addition on the house, to accommodate the children we have been blessed with. Sara found a book just after we last visited that has something like 5,000 babies names in it. She gave it to us as a baby shower gift when Dayna was expecting our third child together. We all know it was meant as a joke, sort of, but that book has made the rounds through the entire group, and all the others as well. That beautiful young spirit we named Amanda, but we all call her Amy.

Amy is now eight and has learned how to be a little pain in the neck just like her older brothers and sisters. She is now helping them teach baby Billy, baby Gary, baby Sara, baby Morgan, baby Mindy, and baby Toni, how to wrap their daddy around their tiny little fingers, to get him to let them do anything they want. That will never happen, but me and their moms are pretty lenient, as long as what they want to do isn’t dangerous or will hurt others. Dayna did not have all those babies, but they are all in the family. Teddy and Nickie are now married. They could not quite wait until they turned eighteen, but they were both seventeen and we all agreed that they have both been doing the work of an adult since they were twelve or thirteen, so what difference does a few months make.

They have made us all very proud grandparents, they have a very handsome son they named little Jon. Unlike Tim and Charity, they love the story of Robin Hood. Plus Nickie told us that being named after me; he can’t help but be a handsome talented man. The ladies in the family, both young and not so young, told her that they are already married so she doesn’t have to be nice to me anymore. Jerry married Paige. They are still waiting to have children. Jerry’s sisters always tell Paige how sorry they are for her, because their brother is kind of slow. The biggest surprise when it comes to weddings is when Steve, who lived with us more than with his family, asked Lisa to be his wife. When she said yes, Becky said if she had known that Lisa liked him, she would never have let him stay at our house. Naturally she was kidding. We all love Steve like part of the family.

Kathy, Karen and Christy waited until just last year to get married. They dated several young men and wound up marrying young men from Doctor Dons group. Kathy’s husband has been working with both Doctor Don and Doc Betty learning how to be a doctor. The twins, Tina and Tammy are not married yet. They say they want to make sure their little brothers and sisters get the maximum benefit of their knowledge, before they take the fatal plunge into matrimony. Zeus and Missy are still their constant companions, plus they look after the new children as well as they did the twins. There are two new puppies that tag along like Zeus did, when he was a puppy. The children named them Biscuit, and Cricket, and love them as much as the twins have always loved Zeus and Missy.

Little Timmy is not so little anymore. He reminds everybody of Teddy and seems to be following in his big brothers footsteps. At thirteen he is one of our best hunters, and always seems to know when he is needed, because he shows up like Teddy used to when he was needed most. He is as tall as I am, and weighs almost two hundred pounds. He is very popular with the girls his age, and even some a year or two older and younger. Billy’s daughter Bobbi seems to be the young lady that he likes the most. I told him he can’t marry her, because that would make Ramona and I related, so both Ramona and Bobbi, along with her Aunt Bobbi, smacked me and told me to leave young love alone.

Speaking of match making, okay I know we weren’t exactly speaking about that, but you will get a kick out of this. You remember that Sara, Jenna, Morgan, and Lindsay were all expecting when we visited last. Well Sara and Jenna had beautiful little girls, who have personalities just like their mothers by the way, always picking on somebody. Morgan and Lindsay had bouncing baby boys that take after their parents as well. All four of those children can never seem to get enough reading, and they are always studying something. They are really great kids, and we are all sure they will help our community as much as their parents have. Anyway, where the match making comes in, is that whenever a baby is born into the family, no matter who it is, the women all get together and try to guess who they will marry when they get older.

When Sara’s daughter Misty was born, all four of the women in our house, along with our daughters, said that she would marry my son Thomas some day. Ever since then I have been trying to brainwash Thomas by telling him that Misty would not be the girl for him. When he was four he just said that girls are yucky, so I had nothing to worry about. Now he’s eleven and he says that she is pretty cute. Where did I go wrong? Sara keeps saying that she hopes at least one of our children get married, so that she would really be related to me. She always says you don’t have to treat relatives as nicely as you do friends. Sara and I are like brother and sister, we tease each other constantly, but we would not hesitate one moment to defend the other in any and all situations. Heck, Sara brought the recipe for mayonnaise into this world. That alone makes her a saint in my eyes.

Doc Betty and Josh finally have a baby of their own. I say of their own, because they have taken in several children that lost their parents before joining us. They named their beautiful baby girl Faith, because Betty says, they never lost faith that Heavenly Father would bless them with a child of their own. Caroline was as happy as they were, Samantha and Samuel are now teenagers. Samantha is learning medicine from Doc Betty and Samuel is one of our best hunters and farmers. We have been keeping track of all the births since we moved here, and Faith was number one hundred. Listening to me you would think that all we have done for the past ten years is have people get married and have babies. Actually we have had some great progress in other areas as well.

You may recall that Mike, James, Ken, and many others, wanted to try to get the machinery in that factory running, to be able to finish the lids that had already been started, and to run the machine to make the rubber gasket like seals for the other style jars. I think it was only about a month or so after we last visited that we went back to try to get the process going again. Actually we got luckier than we could ever imagine when we ran into an older man and his wife that were living in that city. They had been in another city, but they said something told them to come back to that city, so they did. Anyway, to make a long story short, this man and his wife had worked at that factory before the war, and knew how to run all that equipment. Of course it took them a little while to remember how, but when they did they were very valuable to us.

We started out running the rubber gaskets, and that went better than any of us could have imagined. They even knew of a couple of steps in the process that we didn’t. After the gaskets were cut, they have to go through a high pressure washer with this special chemical cleaner, then they are automatically boxed at the end of the cleaner. They also showed us an attachment that could be put on at the end that allowed us to package the rubber gaskets in plastic bags of one hundred each, and seal them until they are needed.  Our new found friends, named Francis and Mary, had as much fun running those machines as we did, and they kept remembering stories about their friends that used to work with them. We ran all the rubber we knew about, but they showed us that the company used to keep most of their supplies in a warehouse behind the facility. When we checked that out there, we found about ten times the amount of sheet rubber than we already used, and that made over a hundred thousand gaskets.

When we started running the lids that get the rubber bonded to them, they also had some very good advice. They told us that the process specs are a little stingy with the rubber sealant on the lids, so everyone in the shop knew to turn up the settings for how much rubber to coat the lid with. They also told us that if you set them at an even higher level, if you are careful taking the lids off without bending them, you can get two uses off a lid. It was so much fun watching that machine spit out completed lids so fast we worked our butts off keeping up with it. We had so much fun we wish we could have been here to meet some of the people in the stories that Fran and Mary keep telling us about. Fran also knew where the company has the lids plated, so we took a ride over there to see if they had any more ready, before they were so rudely interrupted. When we got there, Fran explained that they usually brought a load back every Monday, and picked up a load of lids needing processed. Sure enough the load that would have come back the day after the war, is sitting on the loading dock waiting for Monday morning. That’s another million of the lids that we can run through the equipment.

I know you are probably thinking that there is no way we need that many canning lids. You are correct there, but there are many more groups than ours, and if we make them while we can, we should always have a ready supply for everyone needing them. Besides the materials will go to waste anyway, so we may as well use them. After running for a couple of hours, Mary remembered that on some occasions they would pack these lids in the plastic bags as well. It only takes a few minutes to convert the packaging, and we are back in business. We did have a couple of miscues, and the equipment had to be adjusted a couple of times while we were there, but aside from that everything went well and we had a great time. We found several more pallet loads of the completed lids that had been covered in plastic shrink wrap and are still usable. We have gone back a couple of times to run more of the lids and the rubber gaskets. We have never run out, but as I said, we feel we may as well use the material before it goes bad. It’s a miracle that it hasn’t already gone bad. That still fascinates James, Jenna, Mike, and Morgan.

The Arizona group found a factory similar to this one, so our resident experts of machinery, along with Fran and Mary, took a trip to help them. I guess they found out that the plant out there was a sister plant to the one we have been to, so they were able to help them with everything they needed. Representatives from Texas, Utah, Washington, California, and New Mexico also met them there, and they all went away with more rings, lids, and jars than they will need for several generations to come. We have made great steps in other areas as well. We found a bakery in one of the cities we visited. I know we have visited other bakeries, and were able to find some very usable items for our groups, but this was a bakery that made thousands of loaves of bread daily. We were able to bring back a couple of the smaller mixers that only hold about a hundred pounds of flour at a time, along with several thousand bread pans that were still in boxes, and had never been used.

It looked like the stuff we brought back was used for making specialty items, and not the main product of the company. Most of the ovens in the bakery were gas powered, but we did find a couple of smaller ovens that are electric. Now, you have to realize that smaller is a relative term, and compared to the large ovens these ovens are small, but they will still hold twenty five loaves of bread at a time. This allows the women in the groups to mix and bake enough bread for the entire group in just a few hours, instead of someone in every house having to spend at least that long just to make enough for their own family. We built what we call our bakery, to put the equipment in. The women and men take turns baking bread for the entire group a couple times a week. We found enough mixers and ovens for three bakeries like that, so when we make bread, we know we have to make it for some of the other groups as well. They take their turns just like we do, so it works out great for anyone.