The First Storm of the season is coming tonight – has already begun, in fact – and we are expecting four to eight inches, no catastrophe but enough to be taken seriously. On a farm, a storm sets a number of things into motion. The animals, first. Donkeys into the barn, hay brought into the barn,  extra feed for the chickens, food in the barn for the barn cats, heated water buckets filled and plugged in. A storm challenges a farm, and exposes any weaknesses. If there is  no panic, there is an anxious focus.

The first storm of my life here came in October of 2003, several weeks after I moved in with a donkey, 26 sheep, and Orson and Rose. I was completely unprepared for the blizzard that howled onto the farm and blew drifts over the fences, and sent the animals panicking right through the gates and into the meadow across the street. I had never seen such a storm, or been out in one, or been less prepared for one. I took Rosie, then a puppy who could fit into my hand out in the howling wind and was astonished at how quickly the snow was piling up and how thick it was, as the animals vanished into the woods below the farmhouse.

Rose looked at me eagerly. Send me in coach, but I hesitated. She was too little. I had no choice. I told her to go get ’em, and then she vanished into the swirling mist. I was horrified that I had let a puppy out into that storm. A few minutes later I heard yipping and barking off in the woods and I put on my new boots and staggered down there, the ice and snow covering my glasses and blinding me. After about a quarter of a mile, I found Rose in a meadow on the woods, all of the animals bunched together in a circle by a culvert as she barked, nipped and circled them. Slack-jawed, I watched as she marched them all the way back through the woods and back into the pasture. I called a friend and we put the gate up and secured it. Rose stood guard over the animals, in her steely-eyed, no-nonsense, bring-it-on crouch and gaze. That was more or less the way things stayed. I welcome the first storm, and bless it, and remember how far I have come, how much things have changed, how powerful a storm of its own time is, the Mother Blizzard of them all.