Okay, this has to be quick because it’s about 20 degrees in this house while I’m typing this, and my fingers are going to stop moving soon. The furnace thinks it is time for everybody to be in bed and so it has given up heating the house anymore. I would think that maybe it’s broken, except that things happened today that let me know that we’re not in that life anymore. Our luck has officially changed.

Yesterday I wrote about our well giving up, and my many troubles and phone calls and the pitiful begging I did, trying to find someone to help, but only hearing person after person tell me it was: (a) going to be more expensive to fix than the war in Iraq, (b) probably impossible to dig into the frozen ground, and (c) nobody would ever be able to find the well anyway, since the “site map” we had been given by the town looked as if it had been drawn on the back of a cocktail napkin by a couple of drunks after last call.

Naturally I woke up today feeling dread.

But then the optimistic man with the backhoe came over, walked the property, shook his head over the fact that there were no visible outward clues of where a well might be, and then said, “Well, I’ll need to get a dowser. See you later!”

I believe my exact words were, “Oh. My. God.”

If you google the word “dowser,” you will see nothing good. Dowsing–also known as “water witching,” has been discredited since the 3rd century, I believe. People through the centuries have been jailed for dowsing. My friend Nancy said her crazy Tennesee relatives used to do it with sticks from the blooming fruit trees–and no one ever figured out how.

So I didn’t hold out a lot of hope. I pictured my entire one-acre yard being turned into a compost heap, frankly.

But, sure enough, an hour later, he was back with a couple who got out of their truck, walked around the property holding some weird sticks–and one minute later, they were back in the truck, and I was running out to the driveway to see what had taken place.

“What do you mean? She found the well,” the backhoe man said, pointing to a woman who looked a little bit like she had walked over from some mountain community early this morning. She just nodded.

“So I’ll be back to dig up the yard in a bit,” he said.

I had to leave home to go do an interview for a story, but when I got back a few hours later–there was a big hole in the yard, and by God, there was a well in that hole! I was stunned.

It’s not where you’d think a person would put a well either. For one thing, it’s about four inches from an addition that was put on this house before we moved in. And it’s huge. And far away from the pipe that leads to the well pump.

No one in their right mind could have anticipated the well would be there.

So tomorrow, other men will come and pull out whatever has gone bad in this well and put in a newer, shinier whatever-it-is, and this time tomorrow, I will be all new and shiny myself. Clean, even.