Time to Pay our Dues

Under the guise of deja vú, our bodies have come seeking what they're due. This is NOT new; it is not a familiar feeling from a past life...it happens every year. And I'm so glad we have recognized it. You see, our lives since starting Foxhole and our family simultaneously have moved so fast, we've hardly come up for air to recognize the pattern.
Morning frost season is the time that it comes...Rich and I sitting in the living room after the morning rush slows and the school bell has rung. Why are we feeling this way? Is it our tardiness in starting to supplement vitamin D, is it some virus which needs treatment? Like a weighted blanket stifling our motivation, something has descended upon us. What is it?
Driving home from preschool drop off, Jack tucked in Mrs.W's rainbow-scape of a classroom, and May surely just sitting in her seat at table 3 in Miss B's class, my daily unadulterated eight minute-ride to be with my thoughts commences. On today's ride, my foggy brain put it together. Of course! It happens almost the same every year...our reckoning with our bodies. Th0ugh we don't feel the full breadth of the off-season until January, we let our guards down just enough come the end of farmers market season and the arrival of Thanksgiving celebrations. We pull off a huge baking and harvesting extravaganza for holiday orders and then...long breath out...phewwwwww. Adrenaline fizzles out and it all catches up to us. The inordinate energy expenditure we demand of our bones and our minds from spring through the fall has tipped the scale. It's time for recalibration.
Damn Newton. By his law, each action has an equal and opposite reaction. And being part of the natural world governed by his hand, we are citizens of this opposite reaction to our season of ACTION: inertia. It manifests in different ways depending on the year. This year underneath an overarching lethargic umbrella, there lies fatigue from various viruses brought home from school, morning sleep-ins only interrupted by the puppies bladders ready to be relieved after a long night of sleep, and of course of course the craving for extra milk in our coffees and a hankering for comfort food. Other years, the reckoning has been much more concerning. Just three years ago during our Thanksgiving week of rest and play, my heart caught up with me after a particularly stressful season...the year COVID entered the scene as well as our baby Jack. I ended up in the emergency room in Sarasota, Florida with a heart event which I recovered from for the remainder of our off-season.
I suppose the 'reckoning' we experience every late November/early December, is emblematic of the way we operated in a given season. How did we maintain our anatomies, how did we pace ourselves? How heavy were our hearts and overburdened were our minds?
Just yesterday, a family friend and budding farmer visited Foxhole. Having been in the business of caring for people's bodies all his life-long career, he saw how lifestyle can wear and tear a body. Venturing into working the land in retirement, he also has distinct insight into the ergonomics of farming. And so it didn't go unnoticed when he mentioned the significance of farming wisely enough to minimize stress to the body as the key to longevity. In fact that trip to the emergency room a few years back and the fall out afterward catalyzed our farming more wisely. We started to make decisions based on how to make our work easier and more efficient before expanding what we do. We accepted where we were financially, respecting our limitations, only able to meet so much demand for our goods, only able to grow in time with our kids who need us so much during these little chick years.
This is not to say that we have mastered keeping a balance in life. In fact I venture to say that in the current conditions of the world, with the burden of expenses of modern life, and with the finite resources we have, it seems that our lives are bound to see fits of imbalance and stress no matter how mindful we are. And so we try to manage that stress, to identify it and treat it as the infection that it is...a virus of its own. And if we succeed in mitigating ongoing stress, we likely won't see another Christmas holiday spent wearing a heart monitor.
And so, just as we inhale citrus and honeyed tea and pump the humidifier at the sign of a cold, we jump to deescalate stress, both physical and mental, which have sat accumulating since May. We pay our dues, sleeping in, resting when illness takes advantage of our tired bodies, saying 'no' more often, making more time for recreation and allowing those responsibilities that can wait for February to take the backseat. And what a beautiful thing that we hit this wall in December, a time when the world around us is flooding our ears with jazz and cozy Christmas music and encouraging us to light a fire and stirring up nostalgic memories which entice me to knit again and read my books and write and bake with my favorite kids in my slippers with snuggly puppies at my feet waiting for me to drop something. And then...for all of us to stretch out on the living room floor and couches with those puppies snoring in my lap and a little Christmas tree sagging under the weight of ornaments collected over the course of our history, charting the years it took us to get here.

Thank you for reading :).
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