The drawing is recognizably the wellhead. Ana had drawn an arrow from the plaque to a stick figure with her name spelled wrong above it. The arrow caption reads in her four-year-old hand: "Mine to take care of someday. " Dot has framed the page. The frame hangs in the wellhouse above my morning coffee mug. Ana comes out to the wellhouse with me on every weekend visit.
She stands on the small step stool I built her in March. She reads the plaque aloud. She reads the brass monogram. She reads the date. She traces the Dutch letters with her index finger.
Her grandfather would have liked her thoroughness. He would have liked her patience. He would have liked the fact that the fifth generation of Brinkmeyers has decided by herself at age 4 that the well is hers to inherit. She will inherit it in 2078. By my conservative estimate, Hendrick would have liked the math.
He had himself inherited the farm from a man Rinder Kipers who had inherited from a man before him who had broken the prairie sod in 1859. The well runs through five generations of Brinkmeyers and three generations of Kipers before us. It will run through the children Ana will one day have. The water is 120,000 years old at the aquifer. The casing is 101 years old.
The plaque is the same. Dorothia polishes it every spring with a small cotton cloth. She keeps it in the wellhouse drawer. She has done it every March since 2016. She does it on the morning of the first warm Saturday of the year, which she has informally named, in her librarian way, plaque day.
Ana has joined her for two plaque days in a row. Now Ana brings her own small cotton cloth. She works the lower corner where the dust collects. Plaque day takes Dot about 20 minutes alone.
Plaque day with Ana takes an hour and a half. We do not mind. The wellhouse is the kind of building that rewards patience. That is the story of the Brinkmeyer well.