Off and on over the course of the day, occasional drops of rain would fall from overcast skies onto the parched fields. It had been close to five weeks without any rain on our farm. Plumes of dust followed our truck every time we went up or down the gravel drive. Rich green pastures had turned brown prematurely in these months of September and October. Yet the drops falling never accumulated enough to mature into even a short drizzle, much less a shower. Then the skies cleared.
That evening, at sunset, I sat on the porch, watching as the faultless blue day shifted gradually into a clear night. The first stars in the western sky popped out … just above a dark band of clouds on the horizon. I observed an approaching cold front. Its line of attack seemed almost unmovable, frozen in the distant west. Using the hornbeam in the front yard as my sextant, I placed the upper edge of the storm bank just four inches below the topmost twigs.
With the emerging starlit night came pink flashes of lightning in the black band. The storm, although seemingly immobile in its travel from west to east, was actually streaming northwards at great speed. It reminded me of those wonderful N.C. Wyeth paintings of the vast cloud giants rolling across the distance. Where were they going? Would they come visit? Did we want them to?
Against that dark outline, bats swooped about one of the orchards looking for prey. The dogs lay about the porch, exhausted after a busy day of harassing each other, oblivious to my observations. The sheep and poultry were already secured for the night in their paddocks and coops, while the pigs in the woods still snarled at each other over scraps from the dinner table. The winds in the woods and among the trees along the driveway sounded like traffic rushing down a busy street: in a hurry, needing to be somewhere else.
And always, as I sat, those flashes in the distance promised a nurturing rain overnight — I hoped. Because, with the millennia-old optimism of a farmer, I had spent the afternoon oversowing ryegrass seed on my test plots in the one-acre paddocks. A few weeks after tilling and planting, and still no rain had left the emerging plants withered and weak. If the storms delivered, then the new seed would help bulk up the winter’s forage. I sat on the porch and waited, watched, listened.
Before leaving my post, I chanced another glance at the hornbeam. The approaching storm was now measured against the horizon at a couple of inches above the utmost branch. Taking that glacial progress as a sign, I came inside and joined Cindy upstairs. An hour later, just before sleep, we lay awake listening to the rain begin to fall on the tin roof.
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Reading this weekend: The Narrative of the Narvaez Expedition (C. de Vaca), a fascinating eyewitness account of a Spanish expedition to Florida that traversed the Gulf Coast to Texas, where the survivors then continued westward to the Pacific … walking, in the 1500s.
Also, The Need to Be Whole, Patriotism and the History of Prejudice (W. Berry). It’s a work I’ll be reading and chewing on for some time to come (at 486 pages); a work that, if I can state after reading a couple of chapters and the introduction, has a thesis, of sorts: “Our problems do not relate to one another in linear sequence, but rather in something like a network, in which correcting one requires correcting several.” I like that a book on such a topic has been written by an elder.
