New Year, Zombie Preparedness, a Hawkeye Miracle

Listen. We're from Iowa. We know spring. We've seen spring come in soft and gentle, with flowers and hope and the kind of weather that makes you want to open all the windows.

When the Sky Started Throwing Things

This was not that spring.

This was spring arriving like it had something to prove — loud, angry, and absolutely not apologizing for it.

Tuesday: When the Sky Started Throwing Things

I was standing at the prep counter in the Colonial Lanes kitchen, doing the ordinary version of my job, when the sky decided it had opinions. The hail did not build up gradually. It started, all at once, with the particular sound of ice hitting a metal roof hard enough that everyone in the building stopped what they were doing and looked up.

The lanes are the expensive part of this story and the reason I was nervous. Hail that size does not just dent a car, it goes through the parts of a building that were never designed to hold weather. We spent the next hour moving what we could away from the windows and checking the roof, and I have a new appreciation for whoever designed the drainage on that building, because it held.

League night was already complicated before the storm. Leagues are the backbone of a bowling alley's week, and when weather disrupts one you are not just losing a night, you are managing a room full of people who planned their evening around you. Some made it in. Some did not, and I do not blame them. Some arrived looking like they had driven through a car wash they did not agree to.

I have thought about why this spring felt different from the gentle ones, and I think it is that we had been promised something soft and got something loud. Iowa spring is not actually supposed to arrive politely. The soft version is the exception. This was the rule showing up on schedule, and we had all briefly forgotten what the rule was.

There is a cost to a spring like this that does not show up in the weather report. The kitchen prep gets harder when you are watching the sky. The deliveries get uncertain. The league schedule turns into a negotiation. None of it is catastrophic and all of it is tiring in the specific way that managing around weather is tiring.

The part I do not mind, and I want to end on this, is that a loud spring means a loud summer is coming. The farmers markets will be busy, the produce will be good, and the freeze dryer will be running full time for the first real stretch of the year. I would rather have a spring that arrives angry and leaves on time than one that never shows up at all.

I was in the kitchen at Colonial Lanes, doing what I do — prepping, organizing, existing in that space where the heat and the smell of fresh popcorn make you feel invincible. Then the hail started. Not gently. Not as a warning.

The Part I Do Not Mind

The lanes are the expensive part of this story and the reason I was nervous. Everything above them is wood, and wood does not respond well to a storm that arrives without warning in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon. We got the cover on. We got it on in the ten minutes that mattered.

This was spring arriving like it had something to prove — loud, angry, and completely uninterested in the schedule we had built around it. The forecast had said rain. The forecast had been wrong about most things that week.

I have thought about why this spring felt different from the gentle ones, and the answer is that we were not ready for it. A soft spring lets you ease into it. This one demanded a decision in ten minutes, and the whole season has felt like a series of those decisions since.

There is a cost to a spring like this that does not show up in the weather report. It shows up in the three weeks afterward, when every conversation with a league captain starts with an apology and every invoice gets read twice.

The part I do not mind, and I want to end on this, is that a loud spring means the work is visible. When everything goes smoothly nobody learns anything. When the roof makes a noise you have never heard before, you find out exactly which parts of the building you had been assuming about. So I will take the loud spring.

League night was already complicated before the storm. Leagues are the backbone of the business, which means a weather event is never just a weather event — it is a scheduling problem that arrives with no notice and no refund policy.

What I keep thinking about is how fast it moved. We were not brave or prepared. We were lucky, and we were in the room, and we had done the drill often enough that nobody had to be told what to grab. That is the whole defense, and it is not a satisfying answer.

The repair estimate came back higher than we hoped and lower than we feared, which is its own kind of information. We are doing the essential work now and deferring the cosmetic work, which is a decision I have gotten better at making without agonizing for three days first.

What Spring Actually Costs Us

Stay curious. Stay crunchy. Stay cosmic.

— Sara Jane Shelvock, CEO, Torus Coffee Company LLC