My farm notes often seem to start with the wind, writing as I frequently do just before sunrise. In the dark it is what I hear that informs. Last Saturday morning, the sun would not appear above the eastern ridge for another hour and a half, and out by the barn the gates creaked with each gust. The wind caught the oaks, shaking their dry brown leaves before releasing them to hit the house, then it curled under my drafty windowsill, cooling my hands and coffee.

When I let the dogs out at sunrise, the temperature was an unseasonably mild 69. In an East Tennessee mid-December that can only mean one thing: change. By the time I poured my first cup of coffee and Buster the rat terrier had nailed his first small varmint out in the muscadines, the change had started whipping full force through the valley. I didn’t need the weather service to tell me strong storms would hit us, possibly as soon as late morning, before piling up and spilling over the mountains to our east. Sure enough, an early morning peek at the news confirmed devastation far to our west and northwest, with a death toll predicted and only expected to rise.

As the morning progressed, concerned text messages began rolling in to check on our welfare. We did the same with friends who had family in the hardest-hit area of western Kentucky. A friend just 35 minutes to our southeast lost a portion of her barn roof in the path of the storms, but when the first and most intense line had passed, our immediate area emerged unscathed.

Now, not that damage couldn’t and hasn’t occurred before from severe weather in this broad valley. We have had our share of violent storms, floods, occasional heavy snows, even tornadoes (though not in our smaller valley), and, most damaging to our farm, the long-running extreme drought of 2016. But this area of the upper Tennessee river valley, extending from Knoxville down to around Athens, is not noted for extreme weather. This land — an area of 30 to 50 miles across that is tucked between the Cumberland escarpment to the west and the Appalachian Mountains to the east — typically escapes the worst of the weather inflicted on the plateau and Middle Tennessee, as well as the tornado alley that starts near Chattanooga and cuts southeast across Alabama.

Location, for us, matters, at least for now. While the impacts of severe weather are here to see, those of climate change are really a matter of percentages. A 10 percent increase in the number of microbursts, and the town of Waverly is removed from the map. A 5 percent increase in the frequency of F-4 tornadoes, and a candle factory in Mayfield, Kentucky, is blown out. A catastrophic drought lasts 13 months instead of seven.

We could build in more resiliency to our infrastructure. But increasingly too often, we are spending our spare energies and resources just rebuilding. With a 5 percent more here and a 12 percent more there, a budget is soon depleted. The scope of preparing for every wall of water rushing down every narrow valley, the bulldozing of towns by 250 mph tornadic winds, the leveling of cities by a Cat 5 hurricane, the occasional loss of crops on a continental scale — all is too daunting for a civilization that already appears exhausted fighting useless culture wars.

And as we are now learning, while the impacts of severe weather are great, the changing percentages of its frequency are what really tell the tale. That’s a particularly alarming thought when you’ve always taken comfort in thinking your location keeps you safe.

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Reading this weekend: A Time of Gifts (P. L. Fermor). About a young man’s walk across Europe in the early 1930’s.

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