We (Maria, mostly) have stacked six cords of wood in our woodshed, I’m going to call Greg Burch tomorrow and order one more cord. We have the hay for this coming winter already in the barn, it feels so good to have this done in July, several months before we will need it.

Maria decided she loves stacking wood, and she is very good at it. I help out when I can for as long as I can. The people here are beginning to get alarmed about the heat and the changing nature of summer.

When I first came up here about 15 years ago, the summers were reliably short, usually from July 4rh to Labor Day. I’d start wearing warm jackets in August. It started snowing in October and it was common to have – 30 weather in January and February, sometimes for weeks.

All that has changed, and radically, and in a relatively short time. Summer runs from June to October and we have heat waves that we have rarely if ever, experienced. It can snow heavily in late January and February, the temperature often shoots up into the 70’s in February.

It used to be simple to get the hay in October.  I would never wait that long now. And we aren’t certain how much wood we will need.

The heavy rains and brutish heat is wreaking havoc with hay and other crops, it’s hard for the farmers to know what to plant and to find suitable weather for harvesting.

It’s hard for me to imagine how any responsible government official could deny the existence of what I see out the window every day. So does every real farmer.

At the same time, certain periods of the winter are brutally cold, frozen by Arctic Temperatures for days on end. They call it a Polar Vortex. Like it or not, believe it or not, climate change is here. Researchers report now in the Washington Post that 1.2 million Americans lost their homes in 2018 because of extreme weather.

Even the Corporate Nation can’t ignore this reality forever.

Still, it feels good to have so much wood in the shed, and a winter’s hay in the barn.