With that, he stomped back to the tractor and started off toward the barn without us. That was fine by me and Henry—the house was only a few hundred feet away.

“So in the meantime we just keep pulling the cows out of the mud every damned day?” I complained.

“They’ll have to learn to use the trough when the last of the water dries up.” Henry shrugged. Then his tone softened. “You need to stop assuming the worst all the time.”

I groaned and started walking toward the house.

“You’re as stubborn as the cows, Lizzie,” Henry called after me, chuckling. I ignored him, stomping all the way up to the house. I washed up as well as I could with cold water from the hand pump. As I was finishing, Mother brought me a towel.

“What’s got your father in such a low mood?” she asked quietly.

“Cows in the mud at the pond again,” I muttered, taking the towel gratefully. “I told him we should sell them.”

“He’s convinced the rain is coming,” she sighed, then shrugged easily in that gentle, patient way of hers. “Daddy is doing his best. We all are.”

I couldn’t sleep that night. There was so little I could control. I couldn’t make it rain; I couldn’t make Dad face reality; I couldn’t move the cows away from the mud.

My family accepted it was a problem that could not be solved. But in the depth of that night, I considered the same situation and decided it didn’t have to be a problem at all.

The next morning, I pulled a wide leather hat over my orange-red hair and popped the collar up on one of Henry’s old shirts to protect my neck from the sun. Then I took a shovel and I walked back to the pond.

“What in God’s name are you doing?” Henry asked. It was lunchtime but I was still working, so Mother sent him down with a lunch pail and some water. If I’d been a little dirty the previous day, I was utterly filthy now that I’d been shoveling sloppy mud for hours.

“Exactly what you told me to. I stopped assuming the worst and started expecting rain.”

I stuck the shovel into the firmer mud so that it stood upright, then dropped onto my haunches beside the pond. Henry watched with obvious amusement as I tried to clean off my hands so I could eat the sandwiches. After just a moment or two, I realized that was a futile exercise and I was famished, so I picked up the sandwiches anyway.

“So what’s the plan?” Henry asked, squatting beside me.

“I’m going to scrape every bit of wet soil from the pond to expand its capacity.”

Henry looked from me to the pond, then back to me incredulously.

“That will take you days.”