The Loan Committee Meeting in a Hailstorm
I spent twenty-two years on bank loan committees before ranching, and the first meeting I ran on my own porch was ruled by hail.
For twenty-two years I sat on a loan committee at a bank in Greeley, in a conference room with no windows and a coffee machine that sounded like it was passing a kidney stone. I thought I knew meetings. Then I bought a ranch north of town, and my first great act as owner was to call a financial planning meeting with my wife, my brother-in-law, and our ranch hand Teodoro, on the back porch, at two in the afternoon, with a pitcher of lemonade and a clean legal pad.
I had printed an agenda. I want that understood. Item one was feed costs, item two was equipment, and item three was a discussion I called Other Business. We got as far as item one when the sky over the Front Range turned a shade of green I associate with old pennies. Teodoro looked at it and said, politely, that we might want to move the meeting. I said we had a quorum and a schedule. Then the first hailstone landed in my lemonade.
What followed was the shortest committee session in my career. Hail the size of walnuts came down on the tin roof of the porch like the whole sky was applauding. We could not hear each other, so we conducted the vote by hand signal. My brother-in-law moved to adjourn by pointing at the house. My wife seconded by running. Teodoro, who has more sense than the three of us, was already in the barn with the horses. I stayed a full minute, holding my legal pad over my head like a man in an old cartoon.
The motion carried unanimously, and the minutes show that it passed at 2:09 p.m. We resumed that evening in the kitchen, where we finished item one and skipped the rest. The next morning I found hailstones still sitting in the pitcher, which I counted as dues paid. I read on the National Weather Service that Weld County gets this kind of storm more than most, and I wish somebody had told me that in the bank. I now keep an umbrella in the conference-room chair, which is the porch, and I have added a standing item to every agenda: Weather. It always wins.
A story like this is the sort of thing the people at farm.FM like to run, and they did, with a picture of the lemonade.