Farm Stories: Shelter from the Storm

“In actual fact, people seldom remember things they have no use for.”
- Daniel Quinn

Two massive floods hit the farm last year, and right now the moon is in roughly the same position and constellation that it was for both floods. But the third storm in three days is passing over head right now, and I'm watching it from the safety of my house and I hate how little it's going to affect me.

I notice nature more since the farm––storms and temperatures and such. It means more to me than it used to. A storm doesn't just pass, and it's gone. A storm is an event on the farm and it lingers. You have to sprint up to the shade-house at three in the morning to save the new transplants from being demolished by pounding rain; or kayak out onto the creek to rescue bags of peat moss that floated away in the flooding; you have to clean up any fallen trees blocking the road; then a few days later you have to cultivate all the germinated weed seed. Storms are what nature lives by, and yet we fortify ourselves against them.

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One week we went for it. We planted a bunch of things that needed fertility and a lot of water, even though it had been dry and hot, but we needed to. It was a gamble. We were exhausted from the rough, long harvest that Friday and none of us had much energy for transplanting but knew it needed to be done and persevered. Then, that afternoon, as I was lying on my bed in a sore heap of fatigue, I heard the rumble of thunder, then the sound of rain drops across the tin roof of the barn and I cheered. I'd never cheered for nature before, it felt good, and god dammit, we needed that rain.

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And now here I sit, like most of the country, sheltered from the storm. If we're out in it, we're bitching about it. If we're inside, we're ignoring it, waiting for tomorrow when the storm will be gone and we can talk about how nice it is to see the sunshine. Most of us (writer not excluded) will never think of this storm again. While for others, it might have been the rain they were waiting for, or possibly the rain that washed away some topsoil. Either way they're rarely ruined by it, as they're always in a position to reap the benefits of storms, not just the catastrophes.