Not that I think all my readers set up a special calendar just to track my comings and goings (And, I might add, if you do, there is something wrong with you and you should get help immediately.) (Why are you still reading? Go get help!), but 50 minutes ago, I was supposed to be settling into my seat at the Kitchen Garden workshop, the first of the day at the Winter Gardening Fair.
Instead, I’m settled in at a coffee shop in Coralville, waiting out an inadvertent snowstorm.
I should not be surprised. This has been the snowiest winter since I arrived in Iowa, and I have been amazed at how my body has finally adjusted—when my car starts sliding on a road, instead of breaking out in a cold sweat and beginning to whimper, I stay relaxed and just let out a steady stream of words that would wilt a tomato plant.
I consider this progress.
So this morning, I got up with plans to get out of the house in plenty of time. Plenty of time, that is, for a dry and cold morning, which is what the weather forecasts all said it would be. There was a 30 percent chance of scattered light snow in the forecast, which, in my interpretation, is significantly different from the reality forecast, which goes something like this:
When you arrive at your car, you will have to brush two inches of snow off it, but the windshield will already be covered with a thin layer by the time you get all the way around the car because it is snowing so hard, and then you’re going to have about a 72.8 percent chance of your feet sliding out from under you because the snow is on top of a thin layer of ice oh yeah oh yeah, and even the trucks out on I-80 are going to be driving 45 mph because the roads are allegedly partly covered but more like mostly to completely covered and why are you even outside, Genie, why, oh why?
That is the forecast I would have liked to have read. I clearly need to find a new weather web site.
I did give it the college try. I got out on the highway, and felt fairly comfortable out there, cruising along at 43 mph, following a four-wheel-drive vehicle that was going fairly slowly, at peace with the fact that I was not going to make it to Kirkwood in time to make the first session, when suddenly it occurred to me that it was snowing even harder, that I couldn’t even really see out there, and that if I woke up on a weekday and the world outside looked like this, I would email my office and tell them I was working from home.
And thusly and therefore, it made not a single lick of sense that I was risking my car, life and limb (although I’ve never been able to figure out why you need your limb if you don’t have your life) to drive to a garden fair in weather that would ordinarily keep me from even opening my front door. And then it occurred to me that there was a chance the garden fair might even be delayed or canceled (according to my sources, which I have checked since getting my coffee, it is not, but that is neither here nor there), and I would feel even more stupid if I arrived and was the only idiot to show up in the snow. And then there it was. An exit. With easy access to a coffee shop.
So I got off the highway. And I’m thinking, now that this is the second year in a row that winter has given me the No-Garden-Fair-For-You smackdown, perhaps I should learn to leave well enough alone and quit registering for this thing.
UPDATE: Snow stopped. Roads cleared. I’m currently sitting at the Garden Fair learning about birds and butterflies with Prairie Robin. Rock on.
Cavagnaro’s root cellar is one of the ones I profiled in my latest article for Edible Iowa River Valley. The winter 2008 issue, which features my piece, as well as features on locally-made maple syrup (including an amazing-looking recipe for Squash Bisque with Maple and Templeton Rye), a tour across the Iowa Wine Trail, and a profile of Jude Becker, who raises organic pigs outside Dyersville.
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