Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink,
taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.
~ henry david thoreau
A time to come home
b y A manda Cather
The writer Anne Lamott says there are essen-
tially three great prayers that humans say, re-
gardless of who or how they worship. The first is
“help,” the second, “thanks,” and the third, “wow.”
So many times during the autumn I find myself
uttering that second prayer with my whole be-
ing. Thanks for the tired body, for the mind still
filled with late-season to-do lists, for the spirit
lifted up by the sharper focus of the new sea-
son. Thanks for the end of the heavy lift of the
vegetable growing season, with crops stored in
barn and pantry for the winter to come. Thanks
for the sheep, out on pasture in their breeding
groups, salting away their energy in the egg and
the embryo to grow and be born on the coldest
night of the year. Thanks for the corn harvest,
which restores the long vistas after a summer
of intense growth. Thanks for the whole earth
around us, engaged in a kind of joyful hoarding
behavior that feels right and natural.
Harvest time on a farm is the culmination of
all the farmers’ labor and luck in the past year.
It is the season distilled, an entire six months of
planting and crop tending winnowed down into
its tangible results. The natural world manifests
this too, all the vibrant growth of spring and
summer delivering one last fiery flourish before
shrinking down to its essentials: the seed, the
root, the DNA of the flock contained in this
year’s survivors. It is a time for celebration of all
that gratitude for the bounty of the year, tinged
with bittersweet recognition that the final ur-
gency of the gathering-in precedes a transition
to the austerity and simplicity of winter. The
celebration of an ending is what brings many of
us to Anne Lamott’s third prayer: “wow.”
The katydids’ raucous summoning of the
frost reverberates through the evenings. Crick-
ets sing in the cool mornings. Warm sunshine
chases away the chill at noon. Field edges are
starred with asters and goldenrod; hedgerows
and woodlots turn gold and russet. There is a
little more time, though the season demands at-
tention and focus, to turn our eyes up from the
ground and witness the change of seasons again.
f
or too many of us, the place where we live is
only a container for our lives, as separate from
that place as the goldfish from the cold curve
of its bowl. As farmers, however, we live at the
threshold between human and wild, where our
intentions are forever coming up against a real-
ity larger and more powerful than ourselves.
For all of us, from the grain farmer with a
precision planter and multi-headed combine to
the vegetable grower on one acre to the shep-
herd on pasture, the natural world by necessity
guides our actions and dictates their timing. If
we have any wisdom at all, we learn to shape
those actions and intentions to our particular
spot, follow its rhythms and indicators, become
what the poet Marge Piercy calls “natives of
that element.” In this way, our farming may be
not simply dropped on top of the land like a
plenty I autumn harvest 2019
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