The Great Iowa Blizzard of ’73
They said it was the worst spring storm in eighty years.
I was young enough to believe that meant something had gone wrong with the world. Old enough to watch my father pull on his boots before dawn and say nothing, which meant he had already made peace with what the day required.
April of 1973 came in like something that had forgotten what month it was.
The snow didn't fall so much as arrive — in walls, in drifts that climbed the fence posts and kept climbing. Twelve feet. Fifteen. In some hollows of Iowa, nineteen. The county brought in special plows, the kind that could blow wet snow far enough sideways to tunnel a path through. We watched the snow pile up from the kitchen window and did not quite believe what we saw.
The electricity left on the second day and did not come back for nearly two weeks.
In its absence, we found out what we were made of.
Mama had bought a cast iron grill that fit over the cast iron hinges of the Ben Franklin fireplace. I don't think she knew then why she'd bought it — one of those purchases that seems practical without being urgent. It became urgent. We grilled hamburgers over cast iron and cooked stew low and slow while the wind pressed against the windows like something asking to come in.
She had a popcorn popper too, the long-handled kind meant for the fireplace. We used it every night that first week, huddled close enough to the fire to feel it on our faces. The corn jumped and rattled in the wire basket. We laughed at the sound of it. I don't know why it struck us as funny, but it did.
There are mercies that come disguised as small things.
Down our gravel road — one mile, four families — the men were already talking before the second morning.
The neighbor with the milking herd needed help. Electric milkers don't run on stubbornness. They run on current, and the current was gone.
My father had always milked by hand. Two cows, morning and night, the rhythm of it as familiar to him as breathing. So he simply walked through the snow to where he was needed and did what he knew how to do.
The other men came too.
Four families. One mile. Enough hands.
This is how it has always worked, I thought, watching from the barn door. Not one man carrying everything. Many men carrying one thing each.
They milked. They worked in the cold and did not complain — not because they were above complaining, but because there was no one to complain to who wasn't already in the same snow.
The creamery was right there. Less than a mile from where we stood — the Mississippi Valley Milk Producers, just at the end of our road. In ordinary times, the truck came to us. Now the truck could not come, and we could not go. The milk sat.
Most of it had to be dumped that first week. Fed to the pigs, poured into the cold ground. Good milk, earned milk, gone.
There is a particular grief in labor that cannot be completed. A farmer knows it. You do the work. You do it faithfully, by hand, before light, in the cold — and sometimes the road is still buried. Sometimes the milk still pours into the ground. You do not stop milking for that.
What we tend, we tend regardless of outcome. I have heard the Good Shepherd say something like this — not in words, but in the way He waited at the edge of the field when we thought the loss was total.
By the second week, our neighbor loaded the old milk cans — the heavy kind, the ones that had been retired to the corner of the barn years before — and found a way through.
Not the way they'd always gone. A different way. Slower. Harder. But through.
The creamery received the milk. The work was not lost.
I have thought about those cans often. How something old and set aside became exactly the right vessel for an impossible moment. How the road that couldn't be traveled one way opened up, eventually, another.
The Good Shepherd does not waste a single season of faithful labor. He knows where the creamery is. He knows the old paths.
He knew about the popcorn popper too.
School came back slowly. First for those who could reach the highway. Then, day by day, for the rest of us.
The world returned to its ordinary hum — electricity, milk trucks, plowed roads. Everything we'd set aside.
But I have never forgotten the sound of the fire cooking something warm for us to eat. The wound of the popcorn popper. My father's hands. The way four men walked through walls of snow to do one necessary thing.
April of 1973 took the lights.
What it gave back, I am still counting.
“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might…” — Ecclesiastes 9:10
Sometimes God hides the reward inside the preparation itself.
A farmer understands this in ways few others do. What we are called to tend, we tend regardless of outcome. The reward is not always found in a cleared road, a saved harvest, or a season finally turning in our favor. Sometimes the reward is quieter than that. It is found in the faithfulness formed inside us while we keep showing up anyway.
Because sometimes the gift was never merely the destination, but the person being shaped through the tending itself — someone who could walk through life differently after the storm because they learned how to walk faithful even in the midst of it.