Hurricane Irene (continued)

Dear Santa,

All I want for Christmas is electricity to be restored at the farm.

Kindest regards,

Tommy Reinhardt

Day 6 without power: Upon returning to the farm on Friday, there was still no electricity. The electric company expected to have the power back on some time in the evening. Unfortunately, Friday is a major harvest day, which means that water is required to clean the produce. As a result, the first hours of the day were spent trucking water to the farm. Harvest started late. And harvest was not completed as darkness fell upon the farm.

However, the bright point of the day, no pun intended, occurred sometime before 6pm. After harvesting the Ruby Red chard, I climbed the hill from behind the house toward the front porch with a crate of that wonderful produce in tow. As the hill was crested and the lilacs were passed on the left, the strangest of sights befell my eyes. The front porch light was on! That was my beacon to alert that power had been restored. And indeed, power had been restored!!!

Ah, but alas, my energy, my vigor had long dissipated. The day was growing old, and all that that electricity seemed to reveal was a very disheveled situation. All of the extra effort put forth to overcome that elongated power outage really seemed to sink in at that point. There were more crops to harvest… but no time to accomplish that feat. And so, as darkness descended once again, at least this time assisted by artificial light, the produce was cleaned and loaded into the van for the next morning’s farmer’s market.

The story of Hurricane Irene is finished, but Mother Nature was not finished with her unexpected intensity. The forecast for Saturday was for rain storms to develop in the afternoon. It was not long after the market started that Saturday morning, when the first storms arrived, in fact the only storms for the day. It has been probably two years since the market has experienced such a rain storm, which has been quite a blessing, but the timing of that downpour could not have been worse. What inevitably occurs when it rains on market day is that very few customers brave the weather to purchase the fresh produce from our stands. And that is exactly what happened that Saturday. After all of the extra effort to harvest produce sans electricity, etc., that produce stood quite idle on my own farm’s tables as rain fell throughout those few hours of our farmer’s market.

All of this described about Hurricane Irene and its aftermath, I personally log under Murphy’s Law-Extended. Whereas Murphy’s Law is: “That which can go wrong will”, the extended version is: “That which cannot go wrong will as well”!!! What else could that be? Well to start, there was a very moisture laden Tropical Storm soaking the Gulf Coast at that point, and its future path would be northeast…