Fall typically comes with a sense of urgency.  The homeschooling schedule is underway, and we must focus on the usual production and selling all while readying the farm and family for winter.  We need to do a final count on CSA shares for the year, work out the processing schedules, get livestock to the butcher, take meat back home from the butcher, make deliveries, close up the Tentrr site.  This year’s a little more urgent.  Bob and I are wiped off the schedule for a few days every other week for the different procedures he requires to be ready to leave us full-time for proton therapy in NYC in November.  Mom and Dad caught RSV while on a vacation visiting their 3 year old and two month old granddaughters.  So Dad’s end-of-season to-do list has moved on to my yellow pad:  Get their firewood stacked, clean out the winter housing for the laying hens, get the brooder ready for the pullets who will be next year’s layers, expand the grazing for the pigs.

It’s so easy to feel it is all impossible. Then, there are these moments when Bob and I sit down and look around us.  And we see the bright blue skies, the jaw-dropping foliage.  And we know that whatever inconveniences we face right now, it is all worth it. … To be here, in this place…To be part of it.  We aren’t tourists visiting for a weekend, enjoying apples and pumpkins, photographing the squashes and the foliage, admiring it all  from the outside before driving back to another life.  Rather, we are inside this stunning world, roasting the apples & squashes with our sausage for supper, feeding the pumpkins to the pigs, all in the glow of this radiant fall color.  We are doing the work that gives this place it’s identity.  In turn, it shapes and colors every part of our world.

And with that moment of glorious reflection, we are reminded that we are not alone here.

Ula and Jack stack the firewood.  Jenn sets up the brooder for the baby chicks.  Saoirse moves the netting for the pigs.  Kyle and Bob clean out the winter barn for the laying hens, then head up to the Tentrr site to close it down for winter.

Many hands make light work and much joy.  And they give me the opportunity to look up, draw a deep breath, then fall in love with my home and life all over again.