Nothing Endures But Change

Strange weather here on the farm today, where the skies were constantly going back and forth from dark gray to bright blue as the sun played hide-and-seek. Temperatures varied wildly as well, with winds up around 25 miles per hour at times. Precipitation came and went a few times, too, though we had none of the hail or more severe stuff that occurred all around us, including tornadoes in the Carolinas and surrounding states.

During the late afternoon I was cleaning stalls and taking care of some other barn-related duties. When inside our modest-sized (four-stall) barn everything sounds a bit more ominous than it actually is. Even a medium-strength drizzle gets amplified to a booming drone on the barn’s roof, while the wind whipping through conjures thoughts of the black-and-white scenes in The Wizard of Oz.

While working I thought in passing about where I was just a few days ago, standing amid tables’ full of poker players who together created a different sort of whirlwind as their chips went scattering around and around. There, too, everything is in constant flux, with any snapshot taken at a given moment becoming relatively less indicative of the scene once another orbit’s worth of hands go by.

At one point I stepped outside the barn to refill some water buckets, and was almost taken aback by the breathtaking sight above.

The sky had been dark and slightly menacing-looking just a few minutes before, as shown in that photo up top. Now it was light again, with a brilliant and vivid rainbow splashing down in the woods that run alongside the edge of our property. A double-rainbow, actually:

(Click either of the pics in this post to embiggen.)

That only lasted a few minutes longer, too, as the sun began to dim and dark clouds swiftly tumbled back to fill the skyscape. Later in the evening I talked with Vera’s mother, describing the scene to her as well as I could. She joked that a leprechaun might have followed me back from Ireland and over in the woods had hidden a pot of gold.

Looks like tomorrow there will be clouds but less of the craziness, if the prognosticators are to be believed.

Perhaps I might wander over to those woods at some point today, just to be sure no one has left anything.