She heard it coming before she felt it, a low sustained note in the barn siding then the sound of loose material moving in the yard, then a push of air through the house gaps that knocked a jar off the kitchen shelf. By 9:00 the wind was driving hard enough that she couldn't see the far fence line clearly. She went out anyway. The surface of the field was moving. The fine tilled soil she'd worked between the rows was lifting in sheets and spinning off the eastern edge and the young plant material was being pressed almost horizontal by the gusts.
She could see immediately that three or four of the clay mouths near the field center had lost their shale covers. She hadn't placed them heavily enough against this kind of lateral force. She could also see in the sections where the wind had scoured the surface hardest, the shoulders of two or three pots emerging from the soil, exposed, meaning the surrounding earth had been stripped or compressed in a way that altered the burial depth. She was back inside for her tools before she had consciously decided to go back inside. She took three of the heavier flat rocks from the pile near the barn, the digging bar, and the spare fill she'd kept in a covered crate for exactly this kind of maintenance need.
She pulled on the heavy canvas coat and went back out into the wind. Working in that wind was its own kind of physical argument. The gusts weren't steady, they came in pulses, each one harder than the last, and the ground-level grit moved into every gap in her clothing and stung the exposed skin at her wrists and neck. She kept her head down and worked by feel more than sight, pressing new shale over the exposed mouths with her full weight, packing disturbed soil back around the exposed shoulders with her hands, because the wind took anything from a shovel blade and threw it sideways. She'd reset four covers and was working on a fifth exposed shoulder when she heard the cracking sound.
It was distinct enough that she heard it even over the wind noise. High, sharp, the specific register of fired clay failing under sudden stress. She moved toward it and found the damage. Blowing debris, she never determined exactly what, a fragment of something from a neighboring property, possibly a piece of dried wood or fence material had struck two adjacent pots in the eastern corn section where the vegetation was just tall enough to funnel the wind low instead of letting it pass over. One pot had lost the top half-inch of its rim.
The second had a crack she could fit her thumbnail into running from rim to shoulder. She knelt in the wind with the cracked pot between her hands and ran her thumb along the fracture and made herself understand what it would cost. Not these two pots by themselves, she could seal the rim damage and pressure the crack with pine resin and get adequate life from both of them. The cost was the thirty minutes she was spending here instead of protecting the rest of the exposed row. And the cost was the wind that was still working on everything she hadn't reached yet.