Not a tornado, but a microburst--that's what our weather gurus are telling us. Whatever, Thursday evening was definitely exciting, not at all the pleasant TV/reading/knitting evening I had planned. Bill is in NM this week--nice for him (it's cool there), nice for me (it's quiet here). But Thursday was anything but quiet.
What you see in the photo (click on it for a better view) is a downed mesquite limb, a broken cedar limb and one of the half-dozen metal sheets that were ripped off the porch roof. I spent a half hour in Archie Bunker (our cement storm cellar) with an indignant cat, hoping that the house would still be there when I opened the door. The dogs refused to go down into that dark hole and got shut up in a closet. Over in Bertram, three miles away, many of the buildings lost roofs and suffered structural damage. No power through Friday night, which made life very hot (Friday's temperature hit 95). No water, either, since our well pumps are electric. But we keep an emergency supply and have plenty of emergency lighting. All in all, we were lucky. What's more, because I couldn't write on Friday (no electricity for the computer), I cleaned up my office instead. I can see my desk for the first time since before April's book tour--no small triumph. I also got up on the ladder and fixed the remaining porch roof panels so they wouldn't blow away.
Cows on the lam. We have some neighbors who have cows but don't have very good fences. What's more, they don't live on the property where they pasture their animals, so they don't regularly monitor them. We have unwillingly hosted their cows a couple of times: there's a story in my memoir about their white bull, who came calling a few years ago, and when Bill and I got back from tour, we found a number of cowpies, evidence that we'd had company again. On Thursday night, the cows--seven or eight, including that white bull--got out of their pasture again and began drifting across Sharon's property (our neighbor to the south--that's her hillside you're looking at in the photo) and then on to our place. We had taken our south fence down to install a gate and hadn't put it back up again, since Sharon doesn't have any animals and our cows live in another pasture, securely fenced. Last night, when the temperature dropped below 90, I put the fence posts up and strung some clothesline in place of the barbed wire (easier for me to handle), with plastic bags tied to the line. I'm hoping this will keep the cows at bay.
Wandering cows, violent storms, drought, heat--you may think it's crazy to say this, but I dearly, dearly love it, all of it. This is all part of the land, the place, the terrain. It's what it is. It's real. And while I am often challenged by what happens here, the challenges help me learn who I am, what skills I have, what my resources are. Important things to know in a world that is changing faster than we can keep up with, faster than we can imagine.
Reading note. I explore the terrain where I live through myself, myself through the terrain.--Barbara Gates, Already Home: A Topography of Spirit and Place