The Threat of a Midwestern Spring

The Threat of a Midwestern Spring
Wise old Mel

Earlier this week I was reading my current fling of a book: All the Light We Cannot See, attempting to curb my anxiety over the raging wind.  It hissed and screeched, testing the solidity of our mighty 100-year old fortress.  I imagine its joints ache during those windstorms of 30-40 mile per hour gusts.  When the thunder and lightning set in, Mel dog moves behind the couch, situating herself in the very center of the house, furthest from rattling windowpanes.  Look to the animals...they know what they're doing.

I dug in to my story that night, in an attempt to take the edge off.  In the darkness that follows dusk, you can sense the trees bouncing and flexing in the wind, but who knows what else is unfolding?  We secured the doors to the chicken coop and growhouse and parked the family car in the barn and got the sheep to higher ground.  I put the lid on the kids' sandbox and the trailer wheels are chocked.  But my leary nighttime mind always goes to the three thirty-foot pines that hug the western side of the house, taking the brunt of the wind.  Our bedrooms line the western wall...what if?  Does the hoop house still have its plastic?  Does the germination house still stand?  Is the power going to go out with a thousand dollars of produce sitting inside waiting for delivery?  

Nose back to the book...a father is evacuating himself and his daughter from their Parisian home, fleeing the Nazi invasion.  He has to pilot his little girl through the experience of war and of losing their home and their life as they know it.  My mind again wandered from the pages...but this time back to an interview I had watched earlier that day of a Ukranian mother who is experiencing that same nightmare with next to no control over her situation right NOW in 2022, and for who knows how long.  Her toddler son ran through the background of the shot, playing and seemingly enjoying this venture that the two of them are on.  I thought to myself...this woman is clearly handling this impossible scenario with grace and poise.  For her son to be able to live a toddler's life without a readable sense of fear and with that magical uninhibited whimsy that only someone under the age of 7 can have.  What a lady.  I wish that she could walk right out of that hell of insecurity and war and back into her old life tomorrow.

With a good handle on my anxiety generally, immersing myself in these stories, fictional as well as heartbreakingly real, it helped shed some light on why I struggle to curb my stress during these spring storms.  That Memorial Day weekend a few years back when Rich and I sat in the hallway of this house waiting out a bad storm and keeping an eye on the radar, to then actually watch one of the tornados which went on to devastate a swath of Brookville ripping through a neighboring field 15 acres away from where we sat, we realized we were in next to no control over our safety.  When you bring your livelihood in the field AND your baby girl, peacefully asleep in her crib for the night, into the equation, it feels as if everything that matters to you could be taken away in a flash.  I remember it being too late to steal May from her slumber to run outside and down to the cellar to take shelter.  I cursed that damn tornado...I swear I willed it away from our house.  Natural disaster and war are hideous beasts.

Beyond a doubt, spring is sweet and sour.  The bitterness of those nights that we keep our ears perked, alert and ready for the tornado siren to sound, unable to focus on conversation, a flick or a book...the sweetness of the still, dewy green morning that ensues with robins popping around the driveway and the possibility of new lambs in the field...what contrast!  Can you agree that this season of birth can be compared to those violent throes of birth itself?  And aren't we all so glad when the child is finally here in his mother's arms?  That calm...the passage complete.  We're a third of the way through this spring with 2 more months of gestation until summer is born in June.  Here's to the journey and to accepting what is out of our control.