The Turning of Seasons

The Turning of Seasons

The thermometer dropped into the low fifties last night, and this morning arrived cool and blustery, rain alternating with patches of blue sky while dark purple clouds stippled the horizon. The winds were gusty enough to shake the first apples from their branches, and already the big silver maple shows its red and orange tinge—small flags of surrender to what’s coming.

Deeply seated in the human psyche lives this little anxiety, this perturbance about winter’s inevitability. We’re reminded - after the languid laze of summer ease - of our fragility, our mortality, and the unforgiving truth of nature.

Here at Ridgemeade Farm, in the heart of the snow belt, we know what awaits: feet of snow, burying everything until spring’s break in March, or April. But we won’t be caught off guard this year.

We have started filling the barn with hay just in time. We’re already canning tomatoes and preserves, storing garlic in the root cellar. In these actions of the farmer, in those who care for land and animals, you can see vestiges of that primal response to the dark, lifeless cold. Stocking the barn with bales, filling our pantry with preserved food—it gives one a sense of preparedness, though who can ever truly be prepared for the winters of life?

Still, there is something in the sight of a barn filled to the roof with hay, jars packed with tomatoes, peaches, and beans, a root cellar full of onions and garlic, squash and potatoes. Storm shutters up, snow fences unrolled. It gives the sense that the fortress has been built against the oncoming war of cold and desolation.

In summer, the barn doors stay open and the animals graze the far pastures. It feels as if our arms were spread wide, embracing all that nature offers. But with winter on the horizon, the farm begins to pull her waistcoat tight, tucking her head down, turning her back to the prevailing wind. We’re not there yet, but already we’re raising our collars in the first few chill gusts, polishing our snow boots, darning our wool socks for the inevitable.

Yet we don’t resent it. We celebrate it. For it is in the turning of seasons that a human feels most alive. In this returning we are reminded of our mortality, of the beauty of the moment we would otherwise take for granted if the weather were seventy-two degrees and blue skies every day all year.

And isn’t this how life is? I welcome the struggle because I know that on the other side—no matter how cold and bitter and brutal—warmth and growth and rebirth await.

This is true sustainability. Not some frozen “perfect”, but the tension between light and dark, the space between ebb and flow, where the death of one thing means the birth of another and so on. Here in the farm we taste this dancing equilibrium with each step.

And so we welcome the long dark winter as a time to slow down, to reflect, to reassess, to heal, to re-create. And then when spring comes again, and the pond melts, and the cherries blossom, we will inhale deeply once again of life renewed, refreshed.