Winds of Winter (With a Working Video This Time)

You know The Grapes of Wrath? The Great Dust Bowl? I'm just not sure I had a sense of the reality of that until December 31st, when the wind blew in the New Year AND our neighbors' topsoil. I hadn't seen winds like this out here since the day a couple of years ago that I chased the hoophouse around the field until it finally collapsed. Matt was smart enough to open the front door and get this video footage. It's like hurricane footage from the coasts, high plains style.



On this morning, when the wind was the worst, we had a lot of trouble getting our woodstove lit. First, the wind came down the chimney as we were lighting it and blew it out completely, sending so much smoke into the house that it smelled for two days like we were living in a yurt. And all day, even once it was lit, the wind would shriek down in and blow smoke out through the cracks in our glass door.



It did shred the tarp on the hoophouse and scatter a bunch of shingles off of our garage and into the corral. It sent my mom's grill, at her house in Fort Collins, careening down the ramp on her new deck and into the railing at the bottom, busting both the grill and some of the railing wood.



It was a crazy day.



Because I'm a bit superstitious now, I'm just happy that it happened on December 31 and not January 1. That way, I can honestly tell myself that it has more to say about the mess 2011 was than the year 2012 can be.



That's my story and I'm sticking to it.



But I am beginning to wonder if Mother Nature doesn't enjoy freaking people out just a little too much.