Something's Coming

The trees lining my ride home from market yesterday were so exuberantly generous in their colorful displays.  How they had anything to give after the punishing weather conditions of the past few months is beyond me.  I thank them for their service as they beckon in the wistfulness of the fall season.  Nostalgia beleaguers me as I find myself craving familiar things and old times too.  October has pulled the rug out from under us, scooting by in a flash, and introducing freezing nights to the forecast.  

Our tasks start to look preparatory, like something’s coming.  Mow the raspberries as they dip into dormancy.  Scavenge for every last pepper hanging sweet and spicy in the field.  Batten the hatches on the microgreens’ chamber, as a kiss from the low 30’s would mean certain death.  And what of us? We gravitate toward our familiar things…tapping into the traditions of apple picking down the road, adorning the house with a box worth of fall decor, that creepy halloween candle that lights the dinner table when evening creeps in earlier by the day.  My playlist leans heavily toward the rich voices of Ella Fitzgerald or the Duke and anyone else who can capture a feeling with just one note of their song.  That something that’s coming is the slumber months of winter.

I’ve identified fall as the season that I fall apart.  As we reap what we can from the fields, they close the door on us at a time of their choosing.  And that’s when we let go to collapse in a heap after a season well sown.  It’s the weight of what we didn’t get to during our high farming season that brings us to the ground.  Relationships unattended to, not withholding our own; our bodies allowed the chance to feel and inhabit themselves, after months of hanging in for go-time harvest season; and the disorganization of the farmhouse closets which didn’t make the cut for our priority list and have fallen into disarray.  Then there’s our hearts and minds which, though fed by the endless stimulation and nourishment of farm work, have to reckon with the unprocessed life that’s gone on without us. I’ve found this imbalance to be inevitable during summers spent running a farm and a family.  

The balance we keep is seasonal.  We depend on the rehydration of the winter season to offset our extraordinarily energetic remainder of the calendar year.  It’s not sudden, in fact we ease into piles of mush which will find the sustenance they need to rematerialize into ourselves by spring.  Slowly, the farm calls upon us less and we tuck bits of this place in for the cold season.  Bits of time offer themselves up for us to take stock of our standing.  We’ve slown down enough to appreciate that the farm provided incredibly for us as we navigated through the most intense season of weather we’ve experienced farming.  The business speaks for itself and I feel we’ve integrated into the community here.  There’s less pressure to tell people we’re here, alleviating the concern that we don’t have a place.  What a gift!  To be embedded :).  After years of farming for the land’s longevity, we’ve also begun to prioritize farming for ours.  Slowly and surely we are eliminating our cheap, labor-intensive processes around the farm and investing in systems which make our work easier on our bodies and which are more efficient.  With a single pass down a veggie bed, the finger-weeder attachment for our tractor, which we were able to invest in this spring, eliminates weed sprouts within ten minutes.  With no deep agitation to the soil and a very efficient use of fuel once or twice on a veggie bed for maintenance, we are spared hours of hand weeding with hoes.  It was the first year that carpal tunnel never surfaced, and the first June that I didn’t wake nightly in pain to massage my wrists.  The farm grows healthier (and wilder) by the year as we feed the soil and the habitat surrounding the veggie planting grows wilder with life.

We have the whole winter to conceptualize the 2025 farm and to set some plans in motion.  In fact, some are already in the works.  More importantly, we have the winter to sit with ourselves, to play, to tend to the parts of us that we’ve neglected.  And to sit with Ella and a coffee on the cold mornings to lose myself in some fiction.  Or else a leisurely walk through Charleston Falls Preserve all bundled up, just Rich and me and maybe the dogs after dropping the kids at school.  Let the unravelling begin :).

Thank you for reading :).

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