It’s been raining all day. As I sit here writing I’m serenaded by the slow and steady drip – drip – drip of water falling into a waiting pan: our ceiling is leaking. It’s a new wound in a very old house, caused no doubt by the extremes of weather we’ve seen this week. A few inches of snow Saturday night was followed by freezing rain on Sunday, a drastic plummet into single digit temperatures on Monday, and a slow warming throughout the week till we arrived at the unseasonably warm and wet day today, Thursday. It’s 53° F out, a 50° swing in four short days, and the world is a sodden and confused mess. On Monday I cursed the cold, on Tuesday I cursed the biting wind, yesterday I cursed the snow so crusted with ice I could stand upon it, and today I curse the deluge. The old farmhouse, dumbfounded by meteorological uncertainty, seems to have given up entirely and let the heavens in. I, for my part, am as equally dumbfounded and good deal more dejected. I’m listening to the rhythm of the leaking roof in a gray and malignant weather induced funk.
It’s a funk that’s lingered all year. Farming is a life tied inexorably to the weather. My lot is less dependent on forecasts than a veggie grower, but I’m affected daily none-the-less. A late snow means the expense of extra hay, a wet spring means rutted fields, a dry summer means hauling extra water. While a herd of hogs won’t succumb to blight on the vine like a crop of tomatoes, inclement weather can still rot a farmer’s morale. And this year mine rotted damn near all the way through.
The year began with a winter than seemed to extend all the way through March, something that seems more and more normal lately. Winters seem to have been slower to get going but less willing to give up their icy grip. Some of the worst snowstorms we’ve received in recent years have come mid-March. A lingering winter this year gave way to a wet spring, but rather than dry out come June the wet weather stayed all summer and throughout the fall. I can scarcely recall a whole week that went by without rain, even in the typically dry months of July and August. In years past I had to manually dig trenches to divert our beaver pond in droughty weather; this year I worried more about getting stuck in the mud. And mud abounded. The pigs lived in it, the hens sickened in it, and the water truck bogged down in it. The land here has a high water table and clay rich soil, so drainage has always been slow, but this year the soil, much like the farmhouse roof, seemed to just give up and give in to the constant rain. Farmer’s markets, our main source of weekly income, were canceled with disturbing frequency in the face of threatening thunderstorms. At some point, looking out at the soaked fields criss crossed with tractor tire ruts, my sprit just sort of drowned.
Not that I could escape the weather inside. The humidity was the worst I’ve ever experienced in New England; the walls of the house beaded with condensation, books mildewed, and any surface dampness quickly gave way to mold. A solitary window Air Conditioner offered solace in our bedroom, but otherwise we wilted daily in the fetid air. My wife and I realized with relief and shock that had we waited a year to marry, we wouldn’t have been able to: our October wedding the year prior had taken place in the field, in a spot now inaccessible. While the field was normally dry enough to drive across to deliver the tents and equipment necessary for a wedding, this year you couldn’t walk across it without leaving muddy bootprints in your wake. There was no relief from the precipitation, and the pastures wept groundwater till finally began to freeze.
It’s a hard thing to quantify, exactly, how much the weather affected my year. I know I spent a good deal of time soaked to the bone, caught in another downpour. And I know I spent and inordinate amount of time brooding on it and far too much breath bitching about it. It was, ultimately, one of the defining features of the year. In farming circles not a conversation could be had without acknowledging the rainy season, and in my own personal cosmology I couldn’t help but feel like something important had shifted. I can’t say for certain what role global warming played in our unusual weather, but I sense that predictability will be the first victim of a shifting climate. We’ll have wet months that once were dry, snowless Christmases, freak late March blizzards…I don’t think we’ll have weather we can count on for too much longer. I think there will be more and more weeks like this one, offering up misery in a variety of ways, from freezing to flailing on ice to listening to the roof leak. I’m worried that the weather is not going to be just idle country chit chat for much longer, but something that we’re discussing with real concern. I sit hear listening to the drip – drip – drip of the water in the pan and I’m left wondering if it’s perhaps too late to even fix the leak.
The Edible Complex 