Commentary

As we gathered with family and close friends just before Christmas, the rain was relentless. The branch that runs in front of our house and into Howards Creek rushed with such intensity that we had to blow up air mattresses so everyone that could not leave due to what looked and sounded like the Mississippi River roaring through our front yard, had a place to sleep.

(Okay, maybe the branch was not THAT big, but no one dared try to cross the unyielding current!)

Once the rains stopped, the temperature began to drop, the puddles turned to ice, and it began to snow. The temperatures hovered in the teens and twenties for several days before plummeting. A powdery snow accompanied by strong winds created drifts that made some of our county roads and state highways impassable. The danger of frostbite became a reality as the wind howled throughout the days and nights. With real temperatures from -6 to 6 above zero for several days, we experienced wind chills that reached down into the minus 30′s.

When the air temperatures finally began to rise, the fog set in. Dense fog early in the morning and at night made driving the winding and steep roads in my “neck of the woods” very dangerous. And again, the rains came.

As I write this column, I’m looking out my office window at what our meteorologist calls a “dank” day. It’s a gloomy afternoon as my part of the world gets a 12-hour break between rains.

Weather in the Midwest is fickle. It is as though Mother Nature just can’t seem to make up her mind!

2009 was a year whose weather we’ll not soon forget. As we shake the newness off of 2010, let’s pray for more farmer-friendly weather days this year. For those of us with livestock, 2010 hasn’t exactly been what we’d call stellar, but we’re hopeful the weather extremes will even out a bit, with spring just weeks away.

I’ve dedicated quite a bit of space and a whole lot of words painting a picture about the weather extremes I’ve seen in the past 4 weeks or so. The bottom line is that there is a not a darned thing any of can do to change the weather we’re going to get, unless of course we want to move to another part of the world.

Instead of spending too much time fretting about it, let’s look back at some of the lessons we learned and those successes – however negligible they seemed at the time – we enjoyed. Granted, we have to spend at least SOME time fretting because we are human and because the weather is a variable those of us involved in agriculture must consider and deal with.

For me, there are few sights more breathtaking than 2-week old calves running and jumping and romping and playing with one another in fresh snow. As cotton ball flakes float from the sky like confetti on New Year’s Eve, a cow heavy with milk voices her concern in the long, low sound that lets her offspring know she’s not fooling around.

As I crossed the no-longer-overflowing branch this morning, despite the specs of mud on my windshield and the fog that encased my car, I could see the bird as it broke free from a limb on the huge old Sycamore tree. As it glided through the sky, just a few feet above my car, I knew before I saw the white head and tail that it was a bald eagle. I see her a few times a week, often accompanied by a juvenile bald eagle. The weather extremes do not seem to faze her.

Weather is key to making us, and to breaking us, but it doesn’t have to break our spirit unless we give it the power to do so.