In Greensburg

The morning group at Haviland Hardware is pretty fluid. Owner Vic Hannan serves the coffee drinkers who come and go.

Conversation ranges from all the rain the Kiowa County area has received the past few days to the new city storm sirens that should arrive soon. Government spending is a frequent topic, too. Little progress is made on solving issues, but the discussion is spirited.

If you want to find out what’s going on in Haviland, the hardware store is the place to go. Vic opens at 6 a.m. and has plenty of company. It was that way after the Greensburg tornado, too. It was one of the few — maybe the only — places where media types could get Internet access. The hardware store also serves as the town’s grocery and convenience store.

This morning’s group that gathered just before 7 includes the mayor, one council member, a volunteer from Missouri who came a year ago to help and is still assisting those in need, two longtime employees at the farmers’ co-op, the head custodian for the school district, a bank employee who lost his home in the Greensburg tornado and a farmer-bus driver.

The farmer-bus driver is Clifton Clark, who was recently honored for driving Haviland school buses for 50 years. Today, though, he’s fretting over the abundance of rain — somewhere between 5 and 6 inches — that the area has received since Friday.

He and others at the table talked about how they’d like to save some of it for July. The same is true for the temperature, which dipped to a cool 49 early this morning.

Vic Hannan of Haviland Hardware, left, checks on morning coffee drinkers at his store.