Spring Cold is somehow worse than winter cold.
We’ve had a taste of warm. A reminder of summer to come. We’ve been lured into forsaking our long underwear, scarves, and accoutrements. Remembering and realizing that we will need them again is hard, until it’s time to break ice again and thighs have frozen solid. Then you remember the things you forgot. To late to go back for them, to early to remember the next day.
After a day or two without the wind is back. I pitch hay to the horses, against the wind. It all blows into my face and I feed them on the ground instead of the feeder trying to keep some of it where they can catch it as it blows. Everyday as the wind howls I sing the song of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald to them. Apologizing because “it’s too rough to feed ya”.
The exact lyrics if there’s actually anyone out there who doesn’t know the song:
“When afternoon came it was freezin’ rain
In the face of a hurricane west wind
When suppertime came, the old cook came on deck sayin’
“Fellas, it’s too rough to feed ya””
Here’s a link to the song, wonderful, terrible, epic stuff that I really can not listen to, especially on days like this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vST6hVRj2A
I finally got my father in law to just set the rest of the bale in to them. There are times we stop worrying about saving hay and dust. The dust blowing through the air is worse than what Rusty will get from having his head buried in a bale.
As I look out across the hills there are clouds of dust kicking up from any field left without enough cover. The corrals are blown down to hard dirt. Any loose debris is drifted in the corners like brown snow drifts. It reminds me of stories about the dust bowl and how there were, supposedly, whole lines of machinery parked along fence rows that got buried under drifting dirt. It seem s ludicrous, until days, weeks, when the wind blows like this.
We have the benefits of windbreaks and electricity, the internet to keep us connected and entertained. Our house is a basement house, only the top half sticking out. Still I hear the wind whistle and moan, unable to shake the sturdy foundation. I think of pioneer women being driven insane by the isolation and that endless wailing wind. I think of my daughters friend from school who lives in a big old frame house sat on top of a hill. She tells of how her room shakes and rattles as this wind blows. It makes me want to burrow deeper underground. I feel a sense of solidarity, sympathy, and complete understanding.
Soon I may run screaming of into the endless prairie.
