Aftermath

Smoke has been creating a haze since the storm two Fridays ago. Above, tardent bombers are making their way back to the base to reload and head out again. Perhaps these planes are dropping tardent on fires from other lightning storms, but it's been hazy since the Saturday before last.

One thing I've forgotten about the weather down here is its terrible beauty often comes with terrible consequences. I remember how that Friday felt; the air was thick and as each hour passed it seemed as if another layer of pressure was added on. We waited all day for it to come crashing down. And it did. First a little bit of rain fell, the drops big and heavy like the air it cut through. Thunder came only seconds after the flashes of lightning. Then came the storm. Wind and rain beat everything down. The lightning and thunder added the thrill of danger to sideways rain with some flashes interrupting the view between our house and the hay shed a quarter of a mile or so south of us. The reality of what this storm didn't occur to the missus and I until the hail came. Marble sized bits of ice beat on the shop and our deck and our house. We knew if it was hailing at our house, it had to of beat down my wife's crops as well. And the crops of her family. The thought of grain laying on its side and the potato plants beaten into the ground flashed through both of our heads.

The next day we surveyed the scene. Our little valley was no less for where. The violence of the storm left our trees in tact and the only damage was a little tin pulled off of hay shed. On the other side of the hill, south of our place, where the storm came through, was an entirely different story. Some fields were spared. The missus's family's fields were fine. But others were not so lucky. Some potato fields were damaged from the wind; a strawberry field we saw suffered the same. Towards the highway trees and telephone poles were snapped. Wheel lines littered the ditches and were wrapped around poles. And the there were several alfalfa fields were the second cutting had been stripped to the stems. I had never seen anything like it before. Acres and acres of nothing but the spindly stalks of what was left of an entire cutting of hay. Just stems.

Those damaged hay fields have been cut to try and get the next cutting ready and growing. Now only smoke and newspaper stories about the effects of losing these crops on various markets remind us the storm blew through. Life moves on - it has to. To sit and fret about what to do and the losses is counterproductive. Just pick up and move on.