Monday, March 26, 2007, 03:54
Hang Onto Your Hat
I was never so glad to get off a highway.
I went to the Farm Toy Show in Thorp on Sunday with my books. When I left at 7:30 a.m., it was foggy and rainy with fairly calm winds. By the time the Farm Toy Show was finished at 3 p.m., the sky had cleared off somewhat and the wind had picked up considerably.
The wind was blowing out of the south, gusting to 40 mph. And as soon as I got on the highway to come home, I knew it was trouble. The highway runs east/west, and the wind out of the south was blowing right across the highway.
At one point, when there was a particularly strong gust, my little pickup truck actually started rocking. I was afraid the wind was going to flip the truck over.
So, I did what I thought was the sensible thing. I slowed down to 60 mph (the speed limit is 65) to get better control of the situation.
Apparently none of the other drivers were worried about the wind. As each car passed me, I watched with a mixture of horror and amusement as the wind blew each and every one right to the shoulder (and one almost into the guardrail) as they pulled back into the right lane. I could see the drivers were not aware that the wind was pushing them back toward the shoulder until they were almost on the shoulder. Then they would wrench the steering wheel to the left to get themselves back into the driving lane. The wind would push against the vehicle, and it would rock for a while until it settled down again.
I had plenty of opportunity to observe this over and over again, too, because I had 25 miles to go on that particular highway.
I was tremendously glad when it came time to turn onto a north/south highway. I felt the truck rock a few times the rest of the way home, but it wasn't nearly so bad as being on the highway.
When I was two-thirds of the way home, the radio began blaring with the warning horn. It was a tornado warning. The hot, strong wind out of the south was blowing up some storms.
By the time I got home, the sky to the west was dark and threatening. A little while later, the siren began to blow in the town five miles west of us. The storm created more wind, and it rained hard for a little while. Then the bad weather blew past.
In all, we ended up with three-tenths of an inch of rain.
But the best news was -- when the storm blew through, it took the strong winds with it.
The weather forecast says it will remain warm this week. The high today was 75 degrees Fahrenheit. Highly unusual for Wisconsin at this time of year. A couple of people I talked to at the Farm Toy Show said the maple sap was not hardly running at all this year, which doesn't bode well for maple syrup. For the sap to run, the temperature must get below freezing at night and above freezing during the day.
Earlier in March, the temperature was 10 degrees overnight and 20 during the day, so the sap didn't run then, either. And now it's much too warm.
Birds and Such -- We heard a woodcock the other night. Soon they will begin their mating ritual where the male flies high up in the air. So high he is nothing more than a minute speck. Then he plummets toward earth in a free fall twittering as he falls. Just before impact with the ground, the male woodcock pulls up, lands lightly, and then sings at the top of his lungs for a minute before flying high into the air again.
This evening we heard spring peeper frogs, too. They must have gotten thawed out enough to begin singing. At least some of them anyway. I watched a documentary about the frogs a few years back. In the winter, they freeze solid. When spring arrives they thaw out and go about their business as if they had not been a solid chunk of frozen frog only a short time ago. Amazing.
LeAnn R. Ralph
Saturday, March 24, 2007, 19:33
Lost and FOUND!
Last week was a good week for finding lost things.
Earlier in the week, while there was still quite a bit of snow on the ground (it's almost all gone now; the big piles are little more than patches of ice), I took the dogs for a walk in our five-acre hayfield. Since the snow had mostly melted from the middle of the field, I walked back along a straight line from west to east.
As I strolled along in my knee-high rubber barn boots, all at once, something went "crunch" under my heel.
I stopped and looked down. And there it was!
What had "crunched" was the handle against some ice underneath it.
It was Randy's grandmother's trowel!
Last summer, Randy had been using the trowel to set pocket gopher traps. The old trowel is just the right width, he says, for digging out the gopher tunnels. At one point he laid it down on the ground beside him then got up and went to the next gopher mound.
As soon as he realized he had left his trowel, he went back to look for it.
In fact, we both looked for it. And looked. And looked. And looked some more.
We couldn't, try as we might, find the thing amongst the grass and timothy and alfalfa.
After that during the fall, I looked for it in the hayfield a couple of times. But of course, I never did spot it.
And then, just last week, I found it while casually strolling down the middle of the hayfield!
I figured that if I had any chance of finding it, I would find it by accident. And that's exactly what happened.
I picked up the trowel, took it to the house, dried it off, wrapped it in white paper and laid it on the dresser where Randy would see it when he came home. I wrote on the paper "To Randy, From LeAnn, Pixie and Charlie." I wanted to include both dogs because both of them had been walking out in the hayfield with me at the time.
Randy was delighted to see his grandmother's trowel. Merle passed away 6 years ago this spring, and she was really quite the lady. The trowel was just the sort of useful, functional thing she would have in her possession. And after it was "lost" in the hayfield, Randy thought he probably would never see it again.
"I'm going to have to put some pink tape on it so I can find it if something like that happens again," he said.
Another Find -- The second item I found last week was one of my mother's dinner plates. At church. Under a stack of other plates.
After the Lenten service lunch, I was putting away serving plates. I pulled out some plates to stack them better -- and there was the green plate.
I stared at it for a few minutes, dumbfounded.
"Here's my mother's plate!" I exclaimed.
The plate had probably been at the church for nearly 30 years. After Mom passed away, Loretta took the set of dinner plates home with her. She had given them to our mother as a gift, and it was only fitting that she take them. At the time, we knew there were only 7 plates, and we just thought one of them had gotten broken somewhere along the line. Mom passed away in 1985.
I left a message on my sister's answering machine, and she called me back later on. She was thrilled that the plate was found.
The older ladies at church told me they had always known the green plate was there but that they didn't know who it belonged to.
"It was Norma's," I said. "And now you know!"
What I have always liked about that set of plates is the intricate detail. The plates are decorated with silver maple leaves. When my sister saw the set of plates for sale at the old Farmer's Store in Menomonie, Wisconsin, she knew she had to buy them for Mom. Our great-grandfather, an immigrant from Norway, homesteaded the farm where I grew up, and he planted silver maples all around the edge of the yard. The trees are quite large now.
As soon as I saw the plate in the cupboard at church that night, I could almost hear my mother speaking. "If it wasn't stolen and it didn't burn up, it will turn up someday." It was one of her favorite sayings. She always said it in Norwegian first and then in English.
Whenever we can't find something around here -- that's what we say: "If it wasn't stolen and it didn't burn up, it will turn up someday."
And not just once last week, but twice -- that was entirely true!
LeAnn R. Ralph
