Falling?

I hope this blog finds you doing well. It leaves my finger tips with the first inklings that the year has turned the corner. Farmers are starting to cut beans. The cloud deck is low, and last night we sat around a fire eating smores and slowly inching toward the fire seeking the comfort of the warmth on our faces and leaving the cool on our back sides. Hoping that the kids would go play hide and go seek, so that we could use their absence to shorten the arc even more and get a little closer to that heat that my being will be aching for in two months.

This turn comes every year. It is real. I know it it coming but I am always caught off guard by it. I suppose that part of the issue is tied to day length. I suddenly find myself needing more sleep. This body that could stay up way past 10 p.m. waiting for the sun to go down in July, and hop out of bed at 5:00 a.m. ready to start the day is starting to cry out for bed at 8:30 and is hitting the snooze four and five times barely 60 days later. Three weeks ago I was able to start my bike ride at 7:45 and finish up at 8:30 with enough dusk in the sky to not worry about turning on the head lamp. Now if I am not out the door at 6:45, the 7:45 light will be fading fast and full dark will be here 15 minutes later, and forget about it if there is any cloud cover.

Day length isn't the only symptom that binds me to this turning of the year. My history is all about the fall. At Sharritt Dairy Farms, fall was always about laying in the reserves to get through the winter. Sure Henny Penny planted in the spring, but it was fall when she harvested the wheat and made the bread for winter. Fall was when we harvested the 100 tons of silage to place in the silo that would feed the cows until the grass greened next May. Fall was the time when that corn silage, having had all of the oxygen packed out of it, would ferment in its juices leaving that sweet, biting smell when we started using it in mid-November, that now I only catch when I open a cider jug that has set a week too long in the fridge.

September was when we started freshening cows. Dairy cows do not react well to the heat. It makes them give less milk. Think about it. You are asking a 1500 pound cow to secrete 65 to 75 lbs of a watery substance every day. Ask her to do that and sweat like a pig you are just asking for too much. So after waiting patiently, the fun began on September 1. From September 1 through December 1, if the bull cooperated (he always seemed cooperative), 100 cows would have their calves in 90 days. And the twice daily ritual of milking would stretch from 45 minutes to 2 and a half hours.

Fall is here, summer is gone. It is a good thing I suppose. The summer that appeared to be a time of continually expanding possibilities has had its wings clipped. It is a season of such wild exuberance that I am surprised that an unimpressive season like fall can overcome it. It will though. Summer tried to run into fall. It tried to push its way through. 100 on Labor Day weekend was impressive. Sure it will rally a time or two in early October with Indian Summer. But the sun will point to its falseness; its low angle too weak to fight its way through the dust generated by a harvest in full swing. In the end, that low angled sun will have to fight through the gray days of November.

Fall is that time where we lay the ground work to get through winter. We pull out the sweaters, find the hot chocolate and chili recipes. We rediscover soup and find the register that has the warmest air from the furnace.

We spend every possible moment we can around a campfire with friends outside moving a little closer to the core wringing every moment from a glorious summer wanting just a little bit smore.

Take Care

Roger