An Undefeated Season

A little bit of the athlete mentality still runs my mind. It was developed during my days back on the soccer team, then the volleyball team, and the tennis crew too...Encouraged by Friday nights in the midwest spent rooting on the boys (and one girl in our school's case) on the football field, as they battled to maintain their perfect season. You must resist loss in pursuit of that undefeated status. But it's truly the wrong approach. It's a fool's errand in the game of life and certainly on the farm.

We were given about a week's notice for the tremendous spring storm system that swept through the middle of the country last week. Drama is guaranteed when such an event is forecasted, but not catastrophe. You brace for the potential impact and do what you can to cushion the blow that could befall you. We get the vehicles and equipment into the barn, top off the hens' feed and water, charge our phones and get the lanterns out. When night falls, Rich and I see the kids off to bed and then tuck into the couch to keep an eye on the radar and watch the storm.

This particular event stretched over four days. Four days of accumulated record rainfall, two nights-worth of tornado threats and hail, and fewer hours of sleep than a couple of farmers need. I do love to watch an incoming storm...distant lightning preceding rumbles of thunder, weird winds, and stewing clouds. But during the thick of it, I can't help but draw all the blinds and distract myself with white noise of one kind or another...a movie with the kids, music or even better, running the bath water in the bathroom coddled in the center of our house, while Jack submerges and I dig into whatever Roald Dahl book we're reading at the time. Last week it was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. And so rather than being strung out over the beating our infrastructure and spring plantings were getting, we were lost in 20th century England amongst the Oompa-Loompas, traversing the hallways of a fantastical manufactory. And while so much is happening outside our windows, I really have no business out there. There's no point in sticking my nose in Mother Nature's drama until the storm has passed and we can react on the other side. And in the meantime, is there any better place to be than in a steam room with some fanciful fiction?

Loss is inevitable...the natural world reminds us of what we cannot control routinely. And so, on the other side of the storm, as I emptied our rain gauge once more, I tallied 7 inches of rainfall between the four days. What do you know? Our local meteoroligist was nearly dead on with their unbelievable prediction. This was the most precipitation we've seen fall on this land since we moved here in 2018. A walk around the farm corroborated the rain gauge's story: enough water to flood the back field, making it unrecognizable. It was inviting enough to entice a meandering mallard couple to paddle leisurely over what was prepared field space. Half of our garlic planted in the fall rose above the water, evocative of rice paddies. The broccoli and kale transplants stood frail, leaves battered by the hail. But the perennial growth surrounding the veggie field, the trees and the grass, the pasture and the shrubs were absolutely technicolor, stimulated by the storm and the hydration. The three high tunnels, skinned in plastic stood undisturbed, the soil and the plants within, spared. The plant propagation house we built over the winter, which currently houses a tremendous supply of our transplants, plant sale plants, ginger, and microgreens stood glistening and unscathed. Our little, old house with a roof needing replacing this summer had but the smallest leak; the patch job Rich did to tide us over held despite the tremendous beating that it endured. We were sheltered, the kids none-the-wiser within our home. Is that not a win?

When will a spring come when I remember that an undefeated season is one in which we accept loss as a part of our chosen game?...when I join Rich in keeping the inevitability in perspective and just roll with the punches? He's right, we've risen to the challenges natural and otherwise we've been presented with. Here we are a week after the storm passed, finally able to get into the field again as the it's no longer saturated and frozen. We can now take stock of what we lost. Only about a third of the plants succumbed to stress of the wild weather. How could that be?! Shallowly rooted transplants, waterlogged and frozen, thawed out and apparently resilient enough to move forward. Directly seeded carrots, just an inch tall, resurrected by a few days of sun. There's hope in that. Not all is lost. Plants want to survive. Keep going. May this be a season in which we do not feel defeated. That is the interpretation of undefeated that I find most aspirational. Come what may, we will see it through, our hearts and will undefeated.

Thank you for reading.

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