Excerpt from chat between DH (at office) and myself (at home):

  • me: It’s soooooo windy I fear the hoop house will fly off.
  • DH: It won’t.
  • me: Really?
  • DH: Yeah. Really.
  • me: Check your email.

I had just sent him this:

Yup, that’s our hoop house, SPLAT.

Amie and I were outside for a while in the morning, trying to get the herb spiral going, but the wind got so bad we had to flee inside from the sticks and branches coming down from the trees. We were in the dining room drawing and reading when there was this loud flapping sound followed immediately by a whoosh. I ran to the bedroom window and it was so weird not to see the top of the hoop house where it had been for many months.

But I count ourselves very, very lucky, for many reasons.

  1. No one got hurt.
  2. No plants inside the hoop house got hurt.
  3. I still had little metal hoops over the garlic and rhubarb bed you see in the foreground, so none of these were crushed.
  4. The whole flapping mess got caught by the trees, so it stayed away from the road.
  5. The timing couldn’t have been better: it sheltered the tomato seedlings through last night’s frost, and we were going to dismantle it anyway over the weekend.
  6. And most importantly: THE BEES WERE NOT THERE. If they had not been delayed by a week, their hive would have been right in the path of the flying hoop house and indeed right where it landed. Now that would have been a mess. I can see myself running out there, in veil and gloves…

So there you have it, dear reader. Never say never.