Wild Winter Winds

In the plains we can get heavy-duty weather any time of the year, but the winter winds seem the most notable, at least as long as we're in winter (In spring, of course it's the spring winds, in summer, the rampaging gusts that come with thunder storms, and in early fall, it's the little proto-tornados that show up a bit before Baloon Fiesta). Today's winds are no exception. These are jet-stream winds, rattling in from the northwest, and out here there's nothing to stop them. At least we haven't had any new snow in the past week, which is a really good thing! Two years ago when we had a lot of snow between Christmas and Martin Luther King Day, winds like this could spin eight inches of snow into ten-foot drifts. That year the winds tried to fill up the Galisteo Basin with flying snow on an otherwise clear, sunny-but-cold day, and the state troopers had to close the highway from Santa Fe to Moriarty, plus all the little dirt roads off the highway. I live on one of those dirt roads, and it took me two days to get home. Even at that I had to leave our market van stranded a half mile from home. All that was the inspiration for Tales from a Frozen Driveway, which I sent out by email to all my friends and acquaintences, and which lead slowly but surely to this blog.

Well, this year is not like that, for which I am grateful. Still, it's enough. The dead blue grama grass from last season is flattened and flailing like fur on some shivering beast, and stop signs bash themselves about as if they are trying to fling themselves out of the ground. The roads all become byways for herds of hysterical fluttering tumbleweeds, and one can tell who overgrazed their pastures by how many big tumbleweeds are clinging to the fences (the amount of tumbleweed is inversely propotional to how much grass is left); some fences look like long furry hedges. The greenhouse heaves under the wind's onslought, and I'm always afraid to watch it, much less work in it on a day like this; the plastic covering makes groaning, snapping noises, and there's always the chance the wind could find a tiny spot to dig into and the whole thing could come off. That would certainly ruin my afternoon. But we never worry about the house. We had an inkling of what the weather could be like before we built our house (though an inkling and the truth are sometimes miles apart), and we built a house with seventeen sides and a conical roof rated for hurricane-strength winds. That was in 2000, and it's still holding up fine, even though its deck is getting a little ratty. So let the winds blow, and whistle and scream--we're okay here.