The harvest is over, the summer is gone

I just got the official title for my book yesterday. I'd been calling it A Flame in the Night; the publisher decided to go with just Flame in the Night. It'll also have a subtitle, which they say is important now for making it more findable in internet searches: A Novel of Resistance in Vichy France.

I also have a release date--well, not a date but a season: Fall 2018.

It's awhile (thankfully, because there's still plenty of work to do to make the book perfect) but I'm already excited...

I had a whole complicated post planned for today, but I don't have time to write it, because the weather finally remembered it's almost the end of October and we're finally getting frost. Followed (allegedly) by an actual hard freeze tonight, so it's time to get everything in. I spent Thursday morning gathering my squash and digging most of my sweet potatoes, and yesterday afternoon pulling turnips, digging carrots, and picking my little handful of late-planted pumpkins, still mottled green and orange, in hopes they'll ripen up further inside.

The soil is moist and soft and cold, and clings to the roots as they come out. In the woods in the distance you can hear the chattering of a couple hundred migrating grackles. This has been my favorite time of year since I started farming--especially in the two or three years I ran the CSA section of our now defunct communal farm. The last couple weeks of the CSA, packing boxes filled with squash and potatoes and onions and garlic, hearing those birds chatter with hundreds of voices in the bright woods. They'd fly up in black clouds from one section of woods to another. I'd watch them, relishing the nip of cold air after pouring so much sweat all summer into the land, relishing down to my toes the sensation of slowing down, the anticipation of a warm fireside and immobility. Sweet, sweet immobility.

We used to work so hard, you guys.

I remember the first year I did that job. It was a year of upheaval, the farm manager quitting before the season was half done; I had to take over the CSA garden in mid-season as well. The CSA shares had been paid already. My job was to make sure we didn't have to refund the money. I was theoretically a half-time worker. I remember working eleven hours one day. I worked till my vision was blurry, till I was literally stumbling with weariness. It's hard to explain that sheer bodily exhaustion, in a world where work is mostly made of mental labor and coffee and stress. Which I know is hard too. But that draining of your body, it's different, because you can reach a point (and I routinely did, that year) when there is literally nothing left. You can't do anything more.

I mean maybe if a bear came out of the woods. Maybe then.

And I used to get through it by dreaming about fall. The last CSA share, the first big freeze, were my continual daydream. Something about that combination: abundance and rest. I used to sing the hymn to myself all through September: "All is safely gathered in, ere the winter storms begin..." That was the key, safely gathered. Everything neatly in the fridge, in the root cellar, in the pantry--then you could relax. It wasn't a tidy process. The weather people would announce a freeze and we'd scramble--the potatoes aren't all dug, quick, the squash are still in bins outside the barn and also we need to empty the hoses so the freeze doesn't burst them--we'd scramble, check the temperatures, make our calculations whether we had time to get things up to a heated building, or whether the temperatures meant our produce would be all right if we just shut the doors of the barn. Once during a scramble--a really hard freeze was coming, I guess--I carried fifty pounds of garlic up our steep woods trail, in two very inconveniently sized bags. Which kept slipping. I weighed them when I got to the top; I wanted to at least have some bragging rights to show for that. I don't remember why I couldn't use the truck.

There was something about it, though. The years I worked so hard, by fall I felt this sensation of power in my body, even alongside the tiredness; going up the trail carrying nothing was so easy as to be a pleasure, feeling that extra energy coursing through your veins. Like a runner's high or something. And the weariness lent such a sweetness to the anticipation of being able to stop, to rest. Even thinking about it was lovely. How could simply not moving possibly seem so sweet? The way a warm and lighted house seems sweet from outside in the cold and the dark. You take it for granted, when you've been inside it for hours and hours. Not so much, out on the road.

What was I working for, pouring my sweat into the land for, those years? I was working to save the farm. I knew I had done my part, a distinctly measurable part, to save the farm that year. I was proud of that. I also knew the saving was temporary: we don't go under this year. But it seemed hopeful. The new farm manager was making good changes, sensible ones--and he was a guy you could work with, too. It makes a difference. But what can you do in a system completely stacked against the small farmer--what can you do when Mother Nature decides to get in a few licks as well? Disease reduced the yield of the strawberries. The bitter, bitter cold winter my son was born half-killed the blueberry bushes. The raspberry canes started dying the year after that, from a combination of an aggressive fruit fly and disease. There's a verse from Isaiah that I learned from our farm, that I never would have understood without it: The harvest is over, the summer is gone, and we are not saved.

What was I working for? I'm not even sure. The farm went under. Almost everyone is gone. But the land is still here. The garden I tilled for the CSA, I still grow food in it, for anyone who can use it. The soil is moist and soft and cold, and clings to the roots as I pull them out of the ground. Big lumpy sweet potatoes, flattened and bulging in odd places, like flexed muscles, out of that soil I've come to love. Because I do love it. Having your hands in it till they're drawn to it, rootlike, pouring your sweat into it day after day, will do that. I know that soil. It's my friend.

It could be that I worked for. I'm not sure.