The Lifestyle of Simplicity in Food and Human Nature – Looking back at an El Niño Winter
The give and take of El Niño for Sonoma County Farms
Rain has come in torrents, transforming fields into small lakes. The cars that drive down the mirrored streets leave fountains in their wake, the mirrors disturbed, and the reflections of street lamps blurred.
It is winter time in Sonoma County, a time where you only like the rain when you aren’t the one laying sandbags out in the streets, or you weren’t planning a picnic that never was. Is the rain to make up for last summer? Dry, the earth gray and compact, a summer when afterwards when the first rain came, it felt almost unnatural?
But how can we complain when in Africa there is disastrous food crisis caused by El Niño’s flooding?
In third world countries, El Niño is not a reason to have the roofers come and check your roof, it’s time to despair because the monsoon rains will collapse your mud hut.
We don’t live in mud huts. We don’t live in third world countries. We will be able to prepare for when the real El Niño comes to us, for when we really are at risk of flood waters rises above of our roofs. We may have to rely on storing food. Stocking up. But it will be a long time before we will have to do that.
Green Goose Farm does not change because of snow, we live in California, our farm changes because of summer time. Winter is our summer, and summer is our winter, that is to say that in winter time, the rain replenishes the growth, and things grow, in other climates, the snow would block out the growth, and in the summer, everything dry.
El Niño is give and take. The water is replenished, except daily life is harder for the average person.
Lillian Black is a writer and political blogger, and helps on her family’s farm in Petaluma. She raises her own flock of chickens, and writes about them too. She loves cats and is being homeschooled.
