The Changing Seasons

The year is still new, like the fresh snow that blankets the farm this winter day. But time passes quickly. Bleak February will soon give way to March and a wind from the south. Before we know it, high summer will pour across our fields in a flood of wild flowers. Then blossoms will fade, and the leaves of another autumn will scatter across the pastures. In the blink of an eye it will be winter once more.

My grandmother and grandfather had a farm out on Spring Creek not far from where we live now. When I was a little girl, Grandmother would tell me stories about their life on the home place: Plowing the spring garden with her mule, storing cream and butter in the spring house on hot summer days, gathering persimmons in the fall, walking the snowy fields along Spring Creek. Her life was  measured  by the endless cycles of the seasons. She used to recite a poem to me, words I knew by heart by the time I was five. “January freezes, February thaws. March sends up her breezes, April buds the haws. In May the sun shines brightly, June brings purple haze. July skies are scorching, August lilies blaze. September blooms the asters for October’s golden crown, November leaves come tumbling. December leaves are brown. And so the seasons touch us, winter snows and summer rains. The Seasons’s timeless message, life must end to start again.” Down through the years those words have kept me vigilant as I have celebrated the beauty of  the earth, my island home.

Grandmother and Granddad were a part of the land, and our family has chosen to walk the same furrow, our feet firmly planted in the fields of home.  Winter on a farm is an in-between time. The frozen land sleeps beneath the blowing snow. The buds of next years leaves cling to the bare branches, like beads on a rosary.  Life becomes smaller, yet more intense with the onset of winter.  cows and sheep shelter in the barns; the distant fields lie empty. The animal’s survival depends on us now. Even the winter birds come in close, gathering  next to the house and the dairy barn to eat  at my  feeders.  We stay close as well, tending the hearth and the needs of the animals. The middle of the day finds us indoors instead of out in the fields working. Night comes early, driving us indoors after evening chores, seeking firelight as darkness rides the trees. 

But when we gather around the supper table as a family, we shift gears, and our world expands. We reach out in our conversations, explore a bigger world of ideas, make plans, spin dreams. Seed catalogs appear; there’s talk of which field to plow first, how many cows to breed, what fences will need mending.  As the light grows, so does our world, until one evening we look up, and it’s still daylight when we leave the dairy barn. The cardinal calls from the sycamore tree staking out his territory. In the lengthening twilight, flocks of robins descend on the pastures looking for worms in the warming soil. Spring is coming, the rebirth of the rolling seasons, the unfailing promise of the awakening land.

Ben Logan writes in his book, The Land Remembers. “Let me hear seasons changing in the night. It is any season, and I am every age I have ever been. Streams are wakening in the spring, rain wets the dust of summer, fallen apples ferment in an orchard, snow pelts the frozen land. Once you have lived on the land, been a partner with its moods, secrets, and seasons, you cannot leave. The living land remembers, touching you in unguarded moments saying, ‘I am here, You are part of me.’”

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