When the Pasture Yawns

Evening. Late October

The light changes first. Not the days themselves, but the way they feel stretched thin, like the skin of a drum cooling after song… and yet compressed, thick, like dough rolled out too long. The flock still grazes through the afternoon, but by five o’clock the sun drops behind the ridge, and the pasture begins to yawn.

It’s not sleep exactly — more like a slow exhale. The clovers pull back into themselves; the chicory stems stand dry and dignified, waiting for snow. The sheep know what’s coming. Their rhythm lengthens, their chewing slows. I move them once every other day now instead of daily - matching the slowing rhythm of the pastures - giving each paddock its final rest before winter’s long cover.

Lake Erie has its own way of easing the season — a last warmth off the water, a mist that hovers and softens everything it touches. That microclimate has been our secret teacher. It grants us three extra weeks of grazing, the final sugars rising in the grasses before frost. You can taste it in the fat: the faint sweetness of the last green days.

Soon the bell will ring earlier. The ewes will come in heavy with wool, and I’ll stack the last of the hay, listening for that quiet moment when the field finally settles. This is when the real work begins — not the labor of building or fixing, but the inward kind. Reflection, recollection, accounting, silence. The land rests, and the mind follows if it’s wise enough. We are not just cultivating fields here, but our hearts, and minds too.

The pasture yawns, and the farm breathes with it. In that rhythm, everything that mattered all year — the lambs, the grass, the endless motion — folds into a single truth: we are caretakers - stewards - not owners. What sleeps will wake again, and what seems still is only preparing to grow.