I
84-Lancaster Fanning, Saturday, March 21, 1998
On Being a
Farm Wife
(and other
hazards)
Joyce Bupp
Spring came.
Did ya’ notice?
Good grief. What a goofy year.
Makes one wide-eyed-curious
about what the next months might
bring, weatherwise.
My calf nursery sink spigots
froze up for the first time. Last
week. That usually happens at
least once or twice during winter’s
worst, normally through some
mid-January, week-long stretch of
near-zero nights, with a hefty
wind blowing. The sink is in the
northwest comer of the calf nur
sery, where the wind roars be
tween the bams with all the subtle
ty of a wind tunnel. But, it’s rarely
a problem in March.
Normally meaning most
years, but not this one we keep
a poultry-brooder type light under
there all winter. A single,
hundred-watt bulb gives off
enough heat in that confined, met
al and concrete space to keep the
pipes from freezing. On really,
really cold nights, with heavy
winds. I’ll lay a couple of heavy
paper calf-feed bags over the top
of the sink as additional insula
tion.
So when I bumped the light and
the bulb died several weeks ago, it
was no big deal. Why waste the
electric when it was so naturally
warm and no danger of the pipes
freezing? All it was accomplish
ing was to keep my bottle ot bquui
detergent from getting too chilled
and thick to squirt out easily when
I squeezed the bottle. Diluting the
stuff with water accomplished the
same purpose.
After having to haul hot water
up from the dairy bam to toss
around the underside of the sink to
thaw pipes last week, a new light
bulb went under the sink that
everv day.
The same night the calf nursery
spigot froze, so did the daffodils.
(And die fruit tree buds.) It was
nearly bedtime when I remember
bed the clump of daffodils at die
comer of the house that had
opened blooms a day earlier,
creamy-white blossoms with ruf
fly, pale-yellow centers. Snagging
a paring knife from the kitchen, I
made a hasty dish from the edge of
the porch into the bitter night
Too late. The stems and some
of the blossoms were already rigid
with interpal ice. I lopped off the
blooms and carried them inside
anyway, plunking them into a
small vase filled with room
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temperature water. By morning,
' some had poked up. Two morn
ings later, most of them looked as
fresh as if they had just opened.
Apparently hypothermia hadn’t
quite set in completely. A few re
maining outside, which I missed
in the shadowy dark (and being in
a big hurry), didn’t fare so well
and looked plenty droopy in the
sunshine a few days later.
None of these extremes, how
ever, has bothered the potted bulbs
for forcing, tucked safely into
boxes filled with insulating leaves
and left to chill out Or in the case
of a box or two, left out to chill.
Hyacinths, daffodils, tulips, all
have been recently unearthed from
hibernation and relocated to the
cool greenhouse floor to green-up
their foliage and push buds. And,
once again, some of’em got ahead
of me. A couple of pots of tulips
were uncovered sporting spindly,
yellowed foliage poked up
through the leaf-insulation in des
perate search of daylight.
They knew it was spring. Even
if we arent’ so sure.
In a year which has seen New
England’s electrical grid crashed
under ice, houses on both coasts
slip-sliding into the oceans, dairy
bams in New Mexico’s deserts
collapsing under snow, cattle dead
in feedlots behind Plains states
blizzards, and Florida about to
float away, a frozen pipe in March
and droopy daffodils are just no
big deal.
Come to think about it, how
many months of March do we get
that aren’t goofy? And, would that
make El Nino currently normal?*
Now there’s a sobering thought