Season’s Teachings
Do you lose track of weeks? I swear just last week it was June and only a little before that was January. My days are run by a tattered hand-written planner (thank goodness it’s almost time for a new one) and the shearing appointments recorded there. I mark my weekends, when I can with public radio weekend programming but otherwise my sense of months and dates is only vague, flagged with a few key events throughout the year and the change in seasons. Before being on the farm full time I noticed big obvious changes in the seasons but none of the transitions. Seasons were exact dates revolving around semesters, holiday breaks, new jobs. Working without that conventional schedule and being tethered to one small plot on the map now at all times of the year has allowed the seasons to charm me. Transitions and seasons depend more on what the weather does day by day. Each season lasts for far too long this way but that’s where I’ve found the lesson. I used to have a favorite season and now I’m sick of each of them by the end which makes my appreciation for the next thrilling. The repetition delivers renewal so that you can’t help but appreciate change when all of your work depends on it. We’re nearing a full cycle complete again, so it seemed only fitting to share what lessons the seasons instill here on the farm.
Autumn to Winter
If farmers created the calendar, we’d put the new year at the first day of winter. Think of endings in the most sparkling white positive light you can. Endings begin during crisp frosty nights as a teaser for what’s to come. Autumn’s dropping degrees of Fahrenheit mean the end of growing seasons on pastures, in gardens, and in flocks. The end of simple outfit season, a single layer with an optional flannel optional for the more chilled mornings which means the end of barefoot with a book in a hammock season when the days are so long to match the quantity of work which is so abundant that sometimes, inches before succumbing to burnout you can just give in to that book in that hammock and think, well at least I’m still outside under the sunshine because soon you won’t be able to sit still for an extended period of time outdoors. No more 9 or 10 p.m. dinners because it feels unjust to not work until dark. Late autumn means the end of calling the spring-born lambs “lambs” but they’re not quite yearlings so you test out the new title cautiously until it rolls off the tongue finally and then, out of necessity the previous yearlings, now almost two years old and pregnant, join the heart of the flock and are elevated to “brood ewes”. So many staggered endings ease me into a slowing, slowing, slower pace until it’s the dead of – dead? I think peace – until the peace of winter insists on tranquility. I find my sleep schedule unbelievably dependent on day length and transforming guilt into gratitude for the extra hours of sleep is easier when remembering back to much too little sleep had some months before. Reflections are unavoidable thanks to the extra hours of dark, of cold, of cozy. Reflections on – holy cow – another whole year.
Winter to Spring
The earth rested and restored, thawing extends from the solid soil and roots up into tightened limbs all eager for sun-fed vitality again. We have sat still long enough. Shedding layers of insulated bibs and wool sweaters makes room for new energy, new ideas, new eagerness. Not to mention, winter’s meditations have been invigorated with the backdrop of our purest passion – isolated with the flock for lambing. New life, an exponential increase of the animals we live for arrived hot at our cold fingertips and can now grow up as the world around it does the same. The flock, the trees, the temperatures, and intentions are all teetering on the edge of newness! A renaissance! Take in every small moment to smell the warming soil and hear the tree buds singing. Watch hay fields green and short forages sway as a nod towards winter readiness, again already. Even, for one short moment there’s excitement for the return of the bugs! Not for long since a mosquito will surely try to sooth it’s hunger and you’ll try not to wish away the warmth so soon along with its tiny flying companions but take some solace in knowing another couple of seasonal shifts and the atmosphere will be void of them again. Winter takes up the position of my favorite season until the first warm breeze tosses a wisp of hair in front of my eyes as if to say, “hold on” and the sun, right on time, peaks out through prevernal skies to a bone-chilled being and spring washes over me again. During the darkest hours of winter, it can be challenging to remember it does not last but deep down it is understood that spring will return.
Spring to Summer
The most indistinguishable, a sleuth masked in humidity and increased hours of day light. Summer rides in during elevated vulnerability. Suddenly, just days after I swear there was snow still on the ground the world’s photosynthesizing population cranks up production. The endings delivered as a savior last October are beginnings now except, not being barefoot with a book in the hammock because we are rushed. Running to keep up with work and wearing cutoff t-shirts feels good for a time when wind-burnt cheeks and a runny nose are not yet a too distant memory, when so many sheep are to be shorn, when there is so much wool to harvest. Sweat soaked days and lighter socks feel good except pastures are growing, weaned lambs need evaluating, fresh wool is piling high, and such short nights make it even easier for days to blur together so April becomes June becomes August. It’s exhausting and relieving because you are needed. You are an important cog in the greatest machine which is nature, which is lively soils hosting a party of microbes enjoying extravagant cocktails of organic matter to do what it takes to feed us, which is four-legged self-propelled forage-harvesting carbon-sequestering miracles turning sunshine and water into wool, which is enduring downpours and sun burnt shoulders knowing full well you will not catch up with the work until nature, sympathetic by September, decides for itself that it is time to slow up just a little. Once you do forget the feeling of wind-burnt cheeks and a runny nose you still tell yourself this is good, this is warmth, this is an earthen prosperity not to be taken for granted. You do not take it for granted and eventually, exhaustion evolves to gratitude.
Summer to Autumn
Another silent slipping of distinguished dates on the calendar happens falling into autumn. This one is the gentlest signaling for change because it’s the beginning of a change which will ultimately halt the world, encrusted in snow again but not before the landscape paints itself into an attraction like no other. Imagine the equinox as a service: the first alarm bell to prepare and understand balance will be restored. Temperatures may stay warm for a while longer, but a few cool days take up their rightful place and it is exquisite to hide under the cover of a sweater again. Now it is within reason to imagine the day when the flock will come off of pastureland and return to the barn, imagine the last sheep shorn for the year, imagine the small group of fall-born lambs multiplying into the large group that will arrive in March and the excitement that exists. The alarm bell of the season is also a pep talk in the ear of the weary, it is a tug up from your bootstraps when you think summer will finally swallow you whole, ragged and in need of a shower but devoured still. This is when that first tug towards restfulness grabs ahold and does its best to convince you to rush less, sit still more, sleep a little longer. Fairs and festivals, which are truly an excuse to see friends, claim all weekends and transition beautifully into a holiday season unfathomable in August. Nature backs off the grueling required overtime so feeling more human and a little less like the cog in the machine is okay as long as there is enough hay to feed the flock through winter. Feeling human is okay which is great because the idea of family time is thrust forth, along with baked goods and regrets so you must tell someone who you’ve neglected while rushing around in long days to make fences meet and keep animals fed and make markets and push products that you love them, miss them, here’s a pie to say thanks for standing by since I must - what is it they say? - make hay while the sun shines. At a certain point after harvests are complete and requirements to survive winter fulfilled there is an unavoidable happiness. No matter how successful the growing season it is over. The cycle follows through on its promises again.