It is true that farmers are more closely attuned to the weather than most other people these days. I have mentioned in a previous post that the last year we lived in Rhode Island there was a pretty serious drought. I was a gardener then, not a farmer, and the drought meant that I spent a lot more time than I wanted to, watering the vegetables. And every night the Providence weatherman would enthuse about how the next day was going to be great for going to the beach! Never a word about how the hay crop was destroyed. That’s what you get when you live in a place that has turned its back on farming. The weather only matters when you want to go to the beach.
One of the daily joys of living in the country is experiencing the weather and watching the seasons unfold themselves. This being our first year in a new place, every day is a new weather event. Who knew that we would have near-daily morning fogs in the summer? It was eerie to look up and see blue sky while all around you was a grey mystery, often until 9 or 10 o’clock. We did not have a frost until after the middle of October, and the first real freeze only came at the very end of that month. I thought we were pushing things to make our final hay cutting on October 29th, but recently I was talking to a farmer who was still mowing in late November.
Western North Carolina is known as the best place in the South to go see autumn leaves, and apparently the 3rd weekend in October is considered the peak of the year’s color, so the area is filled with people who make an aesthetic pilgrimage. This year the 3rd weekend was a disappointment, though I was caught in a traffic jam of no-doubt-disappointed leaf peepers. I am reliably informed that the color was delayed this year because of the unusual warmth – which certainly has made it easier for Zach and me to do a lot of the work we have been doing. But my outstanding memory of fall color in Green Valley is that the trees on the south-facing slopes turned color a good week or two before the ones on the other side of the valley did. That gave those of us who do not journey to see golden and scarlet leaves an extra-long season.
But the event that prompted this post is not some golden haze of a memory of fall’s golden haze; rather it was the recent blindsiding we got from Mother Nature. Last Friday I woke up to assurances from the weather app on my phone that we were in for a dusting of snow in the morning, with possible accumulation of about a half inch. When I looked outside there was already more than that on the ground, and the snow was falling thickly. (A curious thing about our end of the valley is that, despite the fact that our weather reliably comes from the northwest, the arrangement of the surrounding mountains means that the prevailing wind is almost always from the east.) So it snowed and snowed, and by the time the snow ended, on Saturday morning, nearly 30 hours after it started, we had 11 inches of the stuff.
Fresh snow anywhere is always beautiful. In New York City its beauty starts to fade immediately, but in Leicester, North Carolina it will be with us for quite some time, it appears, since we are now in for about a week of frigid temperatures. Like so many things we humans do, we make our presence known on snow-covered ground by trampling it down until the slushy mud underneath shows through.
But while the barnyard is a sodden mess, the fields and hills beyond the buildings retain their pristine purity. All it takes is raising your eyes from the near ground to the upper pastures to see a newly-revealed landscape, for snow has the magical capacity to transform everything it falls on. As fall moved on into winter and the leaves blew away, all sorts of things that had been hidden were slowly revealed: houses, hilltops, the very shape of the land. Now that the background has gone from dark to light, the grey and black trunks of individual trees have been thrown into stark relief. Even the brittle skeletons of the cockleburs look beautiful – from a distance.
A big snow makes the daily chores of farm life a little more time-consuming. Everything gets sloppy. And cold. You are continually putting your gloves on, only to take them off again to do something. The goats and other creatures need much more hay since their grazing has been curtailed. The turkeys have moved in with the chickens. The rabbit watering system has frozen up and broken down. But Orion still throws his leg over our hill every night (to borrow a memorable image from a Robert Frost poem), and it is a blessing to move through so much beauty.