/* */ December 2025 – Vine Maple Farm

Month: December 2025

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Floods

This morning, for the first time after several days of heavy rain and thick clouds, fog blanketed the fields. The fog gradually thinned, and the sun shone on Mt. Baker, Komo Kulshan, wrapped in glittering white snow. Flood waters have been retreating since yesterday morning.

This flood is said to be the product of an atmospheric river, a phrase my mother’s parents would have thought outlandish, even silly. Nothing like a river crashing down from the mountains laden with precious rock flour.

My mother’s parents owned a farm near the Nooksack River downstream a few miles from Lynden. They expected their fields to be underwater for several months in the year, which they gladly traded for well-watered and fertile soil for their crops.

Their house was on stilts until they bought a parcel of high ground for their dwelling, barn, chicken coops, and machinery shed. When my mother was born during a March flood, my grandfather fetched the midwife in a row boat, a mode of transportation he knew well.

My mother’s father was born on the polders of the Netherlands and grew up in the Dutch community on Whidbey Island where he learned to live on the water. This was before the Deception Pass bridge was built. He courted my grandmother in Lynden. To visit my grandmother, he and his brother rowed across the notorious whirlpools and tidal rips of the pass. I never heard what motivated his brother, but I like to stretch the point and say that I was born to the product of a daredevils in rowboats and spring floods.

I’ve gotten emails from all over asking if my family is okay in this much publicized flood. I answer that like most longtime Whatcom County residents, we have learned to live with the fall and spring floods that arrive most years; this year’s flood is was higher than usual but not unheard of.

Lest anyone doubt, I agree that the climate is changing, but climate is averages and statistical norms; weather is the events of a single day or week. Climate change can be detected with objective answerable questions, like ‘was the average July temperature at a give spot between 1950 and 1980 the same, higher, or lower than the same average between 1980 and 2020?’ Consult the records and you have an answer.

The folks who do those calculations say climate has changed. With all the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime, I’m not surprised, and I don’t think climate change is a hoax. However, a lot of the talk I hear about climate change is, in my opinion, uninformed and not as factual as I would like it to be.

We should all feel sorry for the sufferings of those driven out of their homes by the floods and do whatever we can to help, but I still enjoyed the weather this week: heavy rain splatting in my face and rising waters revealing the contours of the earth in ways that are unseen on lesser days.

The weather service predicts the atmospheric river will return for a reenactment next week. The meteorologists know more than I do, but this morning, looking at the sky and the mountain, I have doubts.

We’ll see. I’m used to being proven wrong. 

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Throwing Down Hay

This morning, looking out over brown fields and drizzle from leaden skies, my thoughts ran to climbing up the long wooden ladder to the top of the haymow to throw down hay. Good thoughts for the first week in December, the beginning of Advent, the ascent from the deep pit of a woeful world to the birth of new life.

Throwing down hay is a symbol for winter that begins long before the short days of December. Bales of hay stacked high in the barn are the remains of summer. On the hottest days of the year, farm families, their neighbors, and distant friends gathered to mow down the grass that springs up in the gentle spring rains and mild early summer sun. The crew exposes the cut blades to the piercing mid-summer sun, then stashes away the sun’s rays absorbed in the dry hay into the high loft of the barn. Mortally hard scorching work.

Haying was the first harvest on the farm. The second harvest came when the green fields of wheat, oats, and barley turned into seas of white and gold in September. Unlike haying, which began in late June and trailed into August, cutting and thrashing small grain took only a day or two. Baling up the straw into bedding for the cows was only another day–  golden straw bales are light and easy to handle compared to hay.

The third harvest was potatoes in late September and early October. We only raised a few acres of potatoes, enough to supply ourselves, our friends, relatives, and a few small grocery stores on Dad’s weekly farm produce route.

Digging and picking was a one or two day gathering of friends and neighbors. No sweating under the summer sun. By potato digging time, the weather was cool and we wore jackets and boots. Some wore gloves to protect their hands, but soaking mud-caked gloves did not warm fingers. No matter: true warmth comes from the heart.

When all the potatoes were stored in the basement under the farm house or pits under redcedar boughs that nearly touched the ground in the woods, harvest was over and winter began.

The barn in December was not the hot place it was during summer haying. The hay mow was freezing in the pre-dawn; a single light bulb cast a weak yellow light; cold stung and stiffened fingers on the long ascent into the mow.

Throwing down hay was more than shoving fifty pound bales over the edge to fall thirty or forty feet to the deck below. The bales had to be tossed carefully. If they did not land squarely, the twine holding them together broke, imposing two or three times the work, picking up the loose hay with a pitch fork and carrying it in to the milking barn where the cows were moving impatiently, nervous low sighs and belches rising from empty stomachs.

A well thrown hay bale soared in glory, sailing in a smooth arc from the perilous edge of the stack, a brave swoosshhh downward, and a satisfying thwummppp when it hit the deck below. Repeat that performance four times, scramble down the ladder to spread the hay in the cows’ mangers in the milking barn, and, in December, wait another hour for sunrise and  its daily winter blessing.